Water dissociation and CO oxidation over Au/anatase catalyst. A DFT-D2 study

With the help of DFT-D2 methodology, we have investigated the adsorption of water on clean anatase(001) and Au/anatase(001). In the former case, adsorption energies of H2O differ to small extent computed employing GGA = PW91 and DFT-D2 methods. While the GGA = PW91 predicts that water would desorb close to 650 K on the TiO2 surface, the DFT-D2 predicts that desorption is most likely to occur above 700 K. A comparison of water adsorption on TiO2 and Au/TiO2 surfaces shows that the TiO2 prefers dimer adsorption whereas the Au/TiO2 prefers monomer adsorption. We found that the diffusion of surface hydroxyls on to the Au cluster from the Au/TiO2 periphery is unlikely and it seems that the CO oxidation would occur at the Au/TiO2 boundary. The results show that water dissociation and CO oxidation steps occur easily on Au/TiO2 indicating that this could be good alternative catalyst for water gas shift reaction industry. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.