Designing Active Sites for Structure-Sensitive Reactions via the Generalized Coordination Number: Application to Alcohol Dehydrogenation

Identifying the structure of the most active site is essential to improve the performance of supported metal catalysts. For structure-sensitive reactions, in silico design cannot be easily achieved combining the scaling relations and Brønsted–Evans–Polanyi relations, which are only built on energy-based descriptors. We used here the generalized coordination number as a structural descriptor and established that low-coordinated sites are desirable when using Co and Cu to perform the acceptor-less alcohol dehydrogenation reaction.