General Structure-Reactivity Relationship for Oxygen on Transition-Metal Oxides

Despite many recent developments in designing and screening catalysts for improved, performance, transition-metal oxides continue to prove to be challenging due to the myriad inherent complexities of the systems and the possible morphologies that they can exhibit. Herein we propose a structural descriptor, the adjusted coordination number (ACN), which can generalize the reactivity of the oxygen sites over the many possible surface facets and defects of a transition-metal oxide. We demonstrate the strong correlation of this geometric descriptor with the electronic and energetic properties of the active sites on five facets of four transition-metal oxides. We then use the structural descriptor to predict C-H activation energies to show the great potential of using ACN for the prediction of catalytic performance. This study presents a first look into quantifying the relation between active site structure and reactivity of transition metal-oxide catalysts.