Pentagon-hexagon-patches with short boundaries (Q1399690)

A pentagon-hexagon-patch is a \(2\)-connected plane graph with all bounded faces pentagons or hexagons, all vertices not in the boundary of the unbounded face of degree \(3\) and all vertices in the boundary of degree \(2\) or \(3\). In the paper the minimum \(\min (h,p)\) and maximum \(\max (h,p)\) possible length of pentagon-hexagon-patches with \(h\) hexagons and \(p<6\) pentagons, are determined. It is also shown that the minimal boundary length is obtained by arranging faces in a spiral form, while the maximum boundary length is obtained in the cases where the inner dual is a tree.