PNNL

Abstract

High quality temperature programmed desorption (TPD) measurements of n-butane from MgO(100) have been made for a large number of initial butane coverages (0-3.70 ML) and a wide range of heating ramp rates (0.3-10 K/s). We present a TPD analysis technique which allows the coverage-dependent desorption energy to be accurately determined by mathematical inversion of a TPD spectrum, assuming only that the prefactor is coverage-independent. A variational method is used to determine the prefactor that minimizes the difference between a set of simulated TPD spectra and corresponding experimental data. The best fit for butane desorption from MgO is obtained with a prefactor of 1015.7±1.6 s-1. The desorption energy is 34.9±3.4 kJ/mol at 0.5 ML coverage, and varies with coverage approximately as . Simulations based on these results can accurately reproduce TPD experiments for submonolayer initial coverages over a wide range of heating ramp rates (0.3-10 K/s). Advantages and limitations of this method are discussed.