Water wetting on representative metal surfaces: Improved description from van der Waals density functionals

We present a simple and useful approach based on the van der Waals density functional to investigate water wetting on two representative metal surfaces, Cu(1 1 0) and Ru(0 0 0 1). We found that a mixed van der Waals density functional, by incorporating the Perdew–Burke–Ernzerhof (PBE) exchange for water–metal interactions and the revised PBE (revPBE) exchange of Zhang and Yang for hydrogen bonding, respectively, correctly predicts the wetting of extended water-chains and half-dissociated water layer on Ru(0 0 0 1), as well as wetting of H-down bilayers on Cu(1 1 0), after correcting zero-point energy.