Catlas: an automated framework for catalyst discovery demonstrated for direct syngas conversion

Abstract

Catalyst discovery is paramount to support access to energy and key chemical feedstocks in a post fossil fuel era. Exhaustive computational searches of large material design spaces using ab initio methods like density functional theory (DFT) are infeasible. We seek to explore large design spaces at relatively low computational cost by leveraging large, generalized, graph-based machine learning (ML) models, which are pretrained and therefore require no upfront data collection or training. We present Catlas, a framework that distributes and automates the generation of adsorbate-surface configurations and ML inference of DFT energies to achieve this goal. Catlas is open source, making ML assisted catalyst screenings easy and available to all. To demonstrate its efficacy, we use Catlas to explore catalyst candidates for the direct conversion of syngas to multi-carbon oxygenates. For this case study, we explore 947 stable/metastable binary, transition metal intermetallics as possible catalyst candidates. On this subset of materials, we are able to predict the adsorption energy of key descriptors, *CO and *OH, with good accuracy (0.16, 0.14 eV MAE, respectively). Using the projected selectivity towards C₂₊ oxygenates from an existing microkinetic model, we identified 144 candidate materials. For 10 promising candidates, DFT calculations reveal a good correlation with our assessment using ML. Among the top elemental combinations were Pt–Ti, Pd–V, Ni–Nb, and Ti–Zn, all of which appear unexplored experimentally.