Activity-Based Screening of Homogeneous Catalysts through the Rapid Assessment of Theoretically Derived Turnover Frequencies

Matthew D. Wodrich, Boodsarin Sawatlon, Ephrath Solel, Sebastian Kozuch, and Clémence Corminboeuf (2019)
Highlighted by Jan Jensen

Figure 1. Adapted from images in the preprint posted under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license

This paper combines Corminboufs' work on linear free energy scaling relationships (LFESR) and volcano plots in homogeneous catalysis with Kozuch and Shaik's energy span model. 

LFESRs linearly relate the reaction energies of barrier heights to a single reaction energy. In this work the all the barriers and reaction energies in Figure 1a is computed via the free energy difference between 1 and 4 [ΔG(4)]

The volcano plot is then obtained by plotting the largest free energy difference in the cycle as a function of ΔG(4). In this particular case that is the barrier between 1 and 4 when ΔG(4) is small and the energy difference between 2 and 3 when  ΔG(4) is large. The optimum catalysts is the one with a ΔG(4) for which these two lines meet and one can screen for such catalyst by computing a single free energy difference.

One problem with thus approach is that the largest free energy difference in the cycle is not always directly related to the turn over frequency (TOF), which is what is measured experimentally. In principle, the TOF should be determined by microkinetic modeling for each value of ΔG(4) to find the maximum TOF. But in this work TOFs are efficiently estimated by the energy span model, which basically considers all energy differences in the cycle (e.g. also between 1 and 3).

Using the TOF plot different energy differences between important and the optimum ΔG(4) value decreases (Figure 1b). The points in Figure 1b show the corresponding TOFs computed without the LFESRs and demonstrate the accuracy of this approach.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.