CO₂ electroreduction on single atom catalysts: the role of the DFT functional

One key process involving single atom catalysts (SACs) is the electroreduction of CO₂ to fuels. The chemistry of SACs differs largely from that of extended catalytic surfaces, presenting an opportunity to improve the ability to activate very stable molecules, such as CO₂. In this work, we performed a density functional theory (DFT) study of CO₂ activation on a series of SACs, focusing on the role played by the adopted functional in activity predictions. The role of the exchange-correlation functional has been widely investigated in heterogenous catalysts, but it is less explored in SACs. We tested the widely used PBE and the PBE+U corrected functionals against the more robust hybrid PBE0 functional. The results show that PBE is reliable if one is interested in qualitative predictions, but it leads to some inaccuracies in other cases. A possible way to attenuate this effect is by adopting the PBE+U framework, as it gives results that are very similar to PBE0 at an acceptable computational cost. The results of this study further underline the importance of the computational framework adopted in predicting the activity of SACs. The work suggests that one needs to go beyond PBE for quantitative estimates, an important consideration when performing screening and high-throughput calculations.