Surface X-ray Diffraction for Characterization of Model Ru Catalyst Surfaces

We propose studying model interfaces between metal catalysts and polymers with high-energy surface X-ray diffraction (HESXRD) to better understand the structural motifs occurring at an interface critical in efforts to chemically recycle plastic. Our results will significantly improve the atomic level understanding of the catalyst interface, in particular the catalyst surface reconstruction and the arrangement and coordination of various hydrocarbon chain lengths as a function of environment. For polymer hydrogenolysis chain length has been shown to impact reactivity and selectivity toward desired liquid products. Understanding the structure of the catalysts surface and the hydrocarbon chains near the catalyst interface is of utmost importance. Comparing our structural results to simulations from molecular dynamics (MD) and density functional theory (DFT) will allow us a deepen our insight into the adsorbed structure of polymers under reactive conditions.