Origin of Oxide sensitivity in gold-based catalysts: a first principle study of CO oxidation over Au supported on monoclinic and tetragonal ZrO2.

The catalytic performance of Au/oxide catalysts can vary significantly upon the change of oxide species or under different catalyst preparation conditions. Due to its complex nature, the physical origin of this phenomenon remains largely unknown. By extensive density functional theory calculations on a model system, CO oxidation on Au/ZrO2, this work demonstrates that the oxidation reaction is very sensitive to the oxide structure. The surface structure variation due to the transformation of the oxide phase or the creation of structural defects (e.g., steps) can greatly enhance the activity. We show that CO oxidation on typical Au/ZrO2 catalysts could be dominated by minority sites, such as monoclinic steps and tetragonal surfaces, the concentration of which is closely related to the size of oxide particle. Importantly, this variation in activity is difficult to understand following the traditional rules based on the O2 adsorption ability and the oxide reducibility. Instead, electronic structure analyses allow us to rationalize the results and point toward a general measure for CO + O2 activity, namely the p-bandwidth of O2, with important implications for Au/oxide catalysis.