The importance of particle-support interaction on particle size determination by gas chemisorption

The interaction of the metal-support and particle shape has a key role on the determination of the particle size by gas chemisorption. This paper demonstrates mathematically that, assuming metal particles with hemispherical shapes (a common assumption in this type of characterisation) can provide misleading results of up to one order of magnitude. Thus, the metal particle sizes are underestimated when the metal strongly interacts with the support and overestimated when there is a weak metal-support interaction. Additionally, we also demonstrate that although the assumption of spherical shapes always underestimates the size of particles, this error is considerably lower with regular geometries than that associated to the effect of the metal-support interaction due to their effect on the particle shape. Herein, it is demonstrated the importance of introducing the particle-support interaction factor in the chemisorption particle size determination.