Reactive molecular dynamic simulations of hydrocarbon dissociations on Ni(111) surfaces

Empirical potential parameters for H, C and Ni elements have been developed for the ReaxFF force field in order to study the decomposition of small hydrocarbon molecules on nickel using molecular dynamics simulations. These parameters were optimized using the geometrical and energetic information obtained from density functional (DFT) calculations on a subset of hydrogen and methane reactions with nickel (111) surfaces. The resulting force field was then used to obtain a molecular perspective of the dynamics of the methane dissociative adsorption on Ni(111) as well as two other small alkane molecules, ethane and n-butane. NVT simulations of dissociative adsorption of methane over a range of temperatures enabled the estimation of the sticking coefficient for the adsorption as well as the activation energy of the first C–H bond breaking. The rate constants of each elementary step (both forward and reverse) of CHx dissociation on Ni(111) were obtained by monitoring the surface species and a microkinetic model was constructed as a result. Qualitative analyses of the simulations of ethane and n-butane decompositions on Ni(111) demonstrate that such reactive MD technique can also be used to obtain useful information on complex reaction networks.