Electronic-Level Insight into the Adsorption and Surface Diffusion Kinetics of a Simplified Glyphosate Model on a Goethite Surface

Abstract

The diffusive processes that occur in minerals involve chemical and physical surface phenomena of great interest that allow for understanding the mobility of different anions of environmental importance. One of them is glyphosate, which is widely used as a pesticide. In this work, we performed Hubbard-corrected density functional theory (DFT + U) calculations to study the adsorption and surface diffusion of methylphosphonic acid (MPA), as a model of glyphosate, on the (010) plane of goethite (GOT), one of the most important Fe(III) minerals in soils and sediments. In particular, the MPA adsorption was studied at the GOT–water interface, finding a strong covalent character in the bond. We also corroborated the occurrence of double proton transfer (MPA to GOT and GOT to GOT). Finally, activation energy barriers were calculated to estimate the half-lives for molecular diffusion, showing that MPA moves almost 3000 times slower than water at the GOT surface.