Isaac Tamblyn

One of the most appealing aspects of machine learning for material design is its high throughput exploration of chemical spaces, but to reach the ceiling of machine learning-aided exploration, more than current model architectures and processing algorithms are required. New architectures such as graph neural networks have seen significant research investments recently. For heterogeneous catalysis, defining substrate intramolecular bonds and adsorbate/substrate intermolecular bonds is a time-consuming and challenging process. Before applying a model, dataset pre-processing, node/bond descriptor design, and specific model constraints have to be considered. In this work, a framework designed to solve these issues is presented in the form of an automatic graph representation algorithm (AGRA) tool to extract the local chemical environment of metallic surface adsorption sites. This tool is able to gather multiple adsorption geometry datasets composed of different systems and combine them into a single model. To show AGRA’s excellent transferability and reduced computational cost compared to other graph representation methods, it was applied to five different catalytic reaction datasets and benchmarked against the Open Catalyst Projects graph representation method. The two oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) datasets with O/OH adsorbates obtained 0.053 eV root-mean-square deviation (RMSD) when combined together, whereas the three carbon dioxide reduction reaction datasets with CHO/CO/COOH obtained an average performance of 0.088 eV RMSD. To further display the algorithm’s versatility and extrapolation ability, a model was trained on a subset combination of all five datasets with an RMSD of 0.105 eV. This universal model was then used to predict a wide range of adsorption energies and an entirely new ORR catalyst system, which was then verified through density functional theory calculations.