Tetraphenylporphyrin electrocatalysts for the hydrogen evolution reaction: applicability of molecular volcano plots to experimental operating conditions

Recent years have seen an increasing interest in molecular electrocatalysts for the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). Efficient hydrogen evolution would play an important role in a sustainable fuel economy, and molecular systems could serve as highly specific and tunable alternatives to traditional noble metal surface catalysts. However, molecular catalysts are currently mostly used in homogeneous setups, where quantitative evaluation of catalytic activity is non-standardized and cumbersome, in particular for multistep, multielectron processes. The molecular design community would therefore be well served by a straightforward model for prediction and comparison of the efficiency of molecular catalysts. Recent developments in this area include attempts at applying the Sabatier principle and the volcano plot concept – popular tools for comparing metal surface catalysts – to molecular catalysis. In this work, we evaluate the predictive power of these tools in the context of experimental operating conditions, by applying them to a series of tetraphenylporphyrins employed as molecular electrocatalysts of the HER. We show that the binding energy of H and the redox chemistry of the porphyrins depend solely on the electron withdrawing ability of the central metal ion, and that the thermodynamics of the catalytic cycle follow a simple linear free energy relation. We also find that the catalytic efficiency of the porphyrins is almost exclusively determined by reaction kinetics and therefore cannot be explained by thermodynamics alone. We conclude that the Sabatier principle, linear free energy relations and molecular volcano plots are insufficient tools for predicting and comparing activity of molecular catalysts, and that experimentally useful information of catalytic performance can still only be obtained through detailed knowledge of the catalytic pathway for each individual system