(377b) Electronic Excitations in Thermal Heterogeneous Catalysis
AIChE Annual Meeting
2017
2017 Annual Meeting
Catalysis and Reaction Engineering Division
New Developments in Computational Catalysis II
Tuesday, October 31, 2017 - 1:01pm to 1:18pm
We performed nonadiabatic dynamics using real-time, time-dependent density functional theory, propagating the nuclei using Ehrenfest dynamics. We study several trajectories of an N2 molecule interacting with Ru nanoparticles ranging in size from 13 to 147 atoms. These simulations show that, during the adsorption and dissociation processes, a significant amount of energy can be dissipated into electronic degrees of freedom, comparable to the amount of energy dissociated into ionic vibrations. This suggests that the electronic structure of catalytic surfaces may, transiently, be quite different from the ground state. We characterize the electronic structure and spatial character of the excitations, and we examine how they can affect the surface chemistry of other species reacting on the nanoparticle.