A DFT study on the enthalpies of thermite reactions and enthalpies of formation of metal composite oxide

The standard thermite reaction enthalpies (Delta H-r(m)theta) for seven metal oxides were theoretically analyzed using density functional theory (DFT) under five different functional levels, and the results were compared with experimental values. Through the comparison of the linear fitting constants, mean error and root mean square error, the Perdew-Wang functional within the framework of local density approximation (LDA-PWC) and Perdew-Burke-Ernzerhof exchange-correlation functional within the framework of generalized gradient approximation (GGA-PBE) were selected to further calculate the thermite reaction enthalpies for metal composite oxides (MCOs). According to the Kirchhoff formula, the standard molar reaction enthalpies for these MCOs were obtained and their standard molar enthalpies of formation (DfHmh) were finally calculated. The results indicated that GGA-PBE is the most suitable one out of the total five methods to calculate these oxides. Tungstate crystals present the maximum deviation of the enthalpies of thermite reactions for MCOs and these of their physical metal oxide mixtures, but ferrite crystals are the minimum. The correlation coefficients are all above 0.95, meaning linear fitting results are very precise. And the molar enthalpies of formation for NiMoO4, CuMoO4, PbZrO3 (Pm/3m), PbZrO3 (PBA(2)), PbZrO3 (PBam), MgZrO3, CdZrO3, MnZrO3, CuWO4 and Fe2WO6 were first obtained as -1078.75, -1058.45, -1343.87, -1266.54, -1342.29, -1333.03, -1210.43, -1388.05, -1131.07 and -1860.11 kJ.mol(-1), respectively. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.