Elucidating the Initial Steps in α-Uranium Hydriding Using First-Principles Calculations

Quantum Calculations of Hydrogen Absorption and Diffusivity in Bulk CeO2

CeO2 (ceria) is an attractive material for heterogeneous catalysis applications involving hydrogen due to its favorable redox activity combined with its relative impermeability to hydrogen ions and molecules. However, to date, many bulk ceria/hydrogen properties remain unresolved in part due to a scarcity of experimental data combined with quantum calculation results that vary according to the approach used. In this regard, we have conducted a series of density functional theory (DFT) calculations utilizing generalized gradient (GGA), metaGGA, and hybrid functionals as well as several corrections for electronic correlations, applied to a number of properties regarding hydrogen in bulk stoichiometric CeO2. Our calculations place reasonable bounds on the lattice constants, band gaps, hydrogen absorption energies, and O-H bond vibrational frequencies that can be determined by DFT. In addition, our results indicate that the activation energy barriers for hydrogen bulk diffusion are uniformly low (<0.15 eV) for the calculation parameters probed here and that, in general, the effect of hydrogen tunneling is small at ambient temperatures. Our study provides a recipe to determine fundamental physical chemical properties of Ce-O-H interactions while also determining realistic ranges for diffusion kinetics. This can facilitate the determination of future coarse-grained models that will be able to guide and elucidate experimental efforts in this area.

A reactive molecular dynamics model for uranium/hydrogen containing systems

Uranium-based materials are valuable assets in the energy, medical, and military industries. However, understanding their sensitivity to hydrogen embrittlement is particularly challenging due to the toxicity of uranium and the computationally expensive nature of quantum-based methods generally required to study such processes. In this regard, we have developed a Chebyshev Interaction Model for Efficient Simulation (ChIMES) that can be employed to compute energies and forces of U and UH3 bulk structures with vacancies and hydrogen interstitials with accuracy similar to that of Density Functional Theory (DFT) while yielding linear scaling and orders of magnitude improvement in computational efficiency. We show that the bulk structural parameters, uranium and hydrogen vacancy formation energies, and diffusion barriers predicted by the ChIMES potential are in strong agreement with the reference DFT data. We then use ChIMES to conduct molecular dynamics simulations of the temperature-dependent diffusion of a hydrogen interstitial and determine the corresponding diffusion activation energy. Our model has particular significance in studies of actinides and other high-Z materials, where there is a strong need for computationally efficient methods to bridge length and time scales between experiments and quantum theory.