Reactive removal of unstable mixed NO+CO adlayers: Chemical diffusion and reaction front propagation
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Ames National Laboratory is a government-owned, contractor-operated national laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), operated by and located on the campus of Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa.
For more than 70 years, the Ames National Laboratory has successfully partnered with Iowa State University, and is unique among the 17 DOE laboratories in that it is physically located on the campus of a major research university. Many of the scientists and administrators at the Laboratory also hold faculty positions at the University and the Laboratory has access to both undergraduate and graduate student talent.
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Abstract
A lattice-gas model is developed to describe the reactive removal of a preadsorbed, mixed NO+COadlayer covering a Pt(100) surface, via reduction of NO with CO, and behavior of the model is analyzed. Since NO dissociation requires an adjacent empty site, the NO+CO covered surface constitutes an unstable steady state. The creation of vacancies leads NO dissociation, the reaction of CO with the O formed by dissociation, the subsequent creation of more vacancies, and thus the autocatalytic removal of the adlayer. The high mobility of most adspecies leads to an initial “disperse stage” of adlayer removal, characterized by an exponential increase in the number of highly dispersed vacancies. Thereafter follows a transition to a “reaction front propagation” stage of adlayer removal, where a chemical wave develops that propagates into the NO+CO covered region of the surface with roughly constant velocity, and leaves in its wake a surface populated only by excess reactant. We provide a suitable rate equation formulation for the initial disperse stage, but focus on a reaction-diffusion equation analysis of reaction front propagation, examining, in detail, behavior for long times where the front is nearly planar. We emphasize that it is necessary to incorporate the coverage-dependent and tensorial nature of chemical diffusion in the mixed adlayer. Both these features reflect the interference on the surfacediffusion of each adspecies by coadsorbed species. Thus, a key component of this work is the development of an appropriate treatment of chemical diffusion in mixed layers of several adspecies.
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The following article appeared in Journal of Chemical Physics 108, 18 (1998): 7795 and may be found at doi: 10.1063/1.476215.