Oxygen Healing and CO2 /H2 /Anisole Dissociation on Reduced Molybdenum Oxide Surfaces Studied by Density Functional Theory.

Reduced molybdenum oxides are versatile catalysts for deoxygenation and hydrodeoxygenation reactions. In this work, we have performed spin-polarized DFT calculations to investigate oxygen healing energies on reduced molybdenum oxides (reduced α-MoO3 , γ-Mo4 O11 and MoO2 ). We find that Mo+4 on MoO2 (100) is the most active for abstracting an oxygen from the oxygenated compounds. We further explored CO2 adsorption and dissociation on reduced α-MoO3 (010) and MoO2 (100). In comparison to reduced α-MoO3 (010), CO2 adsorbs more strongly on MoO2 (100). We find that CO2 dissociates on MoO2 (100) via a two-step process, the overall barrier for which is 0.6 eV. This barrier is 1.7 eV lower than that on reduced α-MoO3 (010), suggesting a much higher activity for deoxygenation of CO2 to CO. As H2 dissociation is shown to be the rate-limiting step for hydrodeoxygenation reactions, we also studied activation barriers for H2 chemisorption on MoO2 (100). We find that the chemisorption barriers are 0.7 eV lower than that reported on reduced α-MoO3 (010). Finally, we have studied the dissociation (C-O cleavage) of anisole (a lignin-based biofuel model compound) on MoO2 (100). We find that anisole binds very strongly on MoO2 (100) with an adsorption energy of -1.47 eV. According to Sabatier's principle, strongly adsorbing reactants poison the catalyst surface, which may explain the low activity of MoO2 observed during experiments for hydrodeoxygenation of anisole.