Transition-state correlations for predicting thermochemistry of adsorbates and surface reactions

Estimating thermochemical properties from linear correlations may provide a pathway to circumvent expensive density functional theory (DFT) calculations for quantities such as pre-exponentials and temperature corrections to DFT energies. Here, we construct thermochemical scaling relations between C1–C6n-alkanes in the gas phase and adsorbed alkyl chains extending from several transition metal surfaces, and examine changes in the slope and fit between metals and adsorption sites. We subsequently add –OH, –NH2, CO, and CC functional groups to the C1–C6 molecules and demonstrate strong linear correlations for thermochemistry across all species. We broaden the correlations to incorporate transition states of C1–C6n-alkane dehydrogenation reactions, where thermochemistry for computationally prohibitive transition-state calculations can be quickly assessed. Additionally, we rationalize the linearity of thermochemical correlations based on the composition of the homologous series and theoretical assessments. As an application of the correlations, we estimate pre-exponentials for elementary surface reactions of ethane and propane hydrogenolysis on Ru(0001), which is of relevance to plastic hydrogenolysis. Depending on kinetically important steps, entropic contributions may be necessary to include in certain reaction mechanisms; in contrasting examples, entropies are found to be relatively insignificant for ethane hydrogenolysis but pertinent for propane hydrogenolysis.