This paper introduces WhereWulff, a
semiautonomous
workflow for modeling the reactivity of catalyst surfaces. The workflow
begins with a bulk optimization task that takes an initial bulk structure
and returns the optimized bulk geometry and magnetic state, including
stability under reaction conditions. The stable bulk structure is
the input to a surface chemistry task that enumerates surfaces up
to a user-specified maximum Miller index, computes relaxed surface
energies for those surfaces, and then prioritizes those for subsequent
adsorption energy calculations based on their contribution to the
Wulff construction shape. The workflow handles computational resource
constraints such as limited wall-time as well as automated job submission
and analysis. We illustrate the workflow for oxygen evolution reaction
(OER) intermediates on two double perovskites. WhereWulff nearly halved the number of Density Functional Theory (DFT) calculations
from ∼240 to ∼132 by prioritizing terminations, up to
a maximum Miller index of 1, based on surface stability. Additionally,
it automatically handled the 180 additional resubmission jobs required
to successfully converge 120+ atoms systems under a 48-h wall-time
cluster constraint. There are four main use cases that we envision
for WhereWulff:
(1)
as a first-principles source of truth to validate and update a closed-loop
self-sustaining materials discovery pipeline,
(2)
as a data generation tool,
(3)
as an educational tool, allowing users (e.g., experimentalists)
unfamiliar with OER modeling to probe materials they might be interested
in before doing further in-domain analyses,
(4)
and finally, as a starting point for users to extend with
reactions other than the OER, as part of a collaborative software
community.