We
recently reported the low-coverage heat of adsorption of phenol
on Pt(111) facets of a Pt wire in aqueous phase to be approximately
21 kJ/mol (relative to aqueous phenol) on the basis of measurements
of the adsorption equilibrium constant. This is much smaller than
the heat we reported for gas-phase phenol adsorption at this same
low coverage on single-crystal Pt(111) under ultrahigh vacuum (200
kJ/mol) on the basis of adsorption calorimetry measurements. Here
we quantitatively analyze the individual contributions that give rise
to this 179 kJ/mol difference using a simple pairwise bond-additivity
model, taking advantage of experimental data from the literature to
estimate the bond energies. The dominant contribution to the lowering
in heat when phenol is adsorbed in water is the energy cost to break
the strong bond of liquid water to Pt(111) (∼116 kJ per mole
of phenol area). The water–phenol bonding is lost on one face
of the phenol, and this costs ∼50 kJ/mol, but this is nearly
compensated by the new water–water bonding (∼53 kJ/mol
of phenol area). The results indicate that the intrinsic bond energy
between phenol and Pt(111) is not very different in the gas versus
the aqueous phase, provided one takes into consideration the expectation
that water forces phenol into islands of high local coverage even
at low average coverage (for the same reason that phenol has limited
solubility in water). This also explains the lack of a strong coverage
dependence in the heat of adsorption when it is measured in aqueous
phase, whereas it decreases by ∼57 kJ/mol with coverage when
it is measured in gas phase. This bond-additivity analysis presented
here can be easily generalized to other adsorbates, surfaces, and
solvents. It clarifies why catalysis with molecules such as phenol
which have very strong bonding to Pt-group metals can proceed rapidly
at room temperature in liquid solvents such as water but would never
proceed in the gas phase at room temperature due to irreversible site
poisoning.