Can catalytic activity be varied on different Cu sites for HCOO hydrogenation?

HCOO pathway dominates the production of CH3OH synthesis on Cu catalysts. HCOO hydrogenation is therefore of crucial importance for its kinetic hurdle. It is reported catalytic variation on different Cu facets as their surface Cu atoms are of different coordination number. Cu nanoclusters are constituted by Cu atoms in different coordination number (CN). Therefore, the present work reports catalytic variation of HCOO hydrogenation along different ensemble sites (ES), which is assembled by numbered Cu sites, on Cu16. To identify geometric characteristics of Cu sites that present high HCOO hydrogenation performance, Cu4, Cu8, Cu32 including Cu(111) are sampled in this work. As a result, we found high catalytic performance of reaction for average generalized coordination number of ES greater than 3.9.