C-O bond cleavage of dimethyl ether by transition metal ions: a systematic study on catalytic properties of metals and performance of DFT functionals.

Studies were focused on late 3d and 4d transition metal ion (Fe, Co, Ni, Cu, Ru, Rh, Pd, and Ag) mediated activation of dimethyl ether, to investigate the intrinsic catalytic properties of metals on C-O bond cleavage. A set of density functional (DFT) methods (BLYP, B3LYP, M06, M06-L, B97-1, B97-D, TPSS, and PBE0) with aug-cc-pVTZ were utilized, and the results were calibrated with CCSD(T)/CBS. The utility of CCSD(T)/CBS calculations for these systems was validated by MRCI/aug-cc-pVTZ calculations. Calculations showed an interesting energetic trend as a function of metal; earlier transition metals tend to give smaller reaction barriers and more exergonic reactions than later metals. This applies to both 3d and 4d systems. For the performance of DFT functionals, PBE0 gave the lowest root mean squared deviations (RMSDs) in terms of both reaction energies and barriers for both 3d and 4d systems, compared to the other functionals. Our studies found that the percentage of Hartree-Fock (HF) exchange plays an important role in the accuracy of DFT methods for these systems, and 26% HF exchange for 3d systems and 34% HF exchange for 4d systems gave the lowest RMSDs.