Properties of fullerenes are critically dependent on the distribution of their 12 pentagonal faces. It is well known that there are infinitely many IPR-fullerenes. IPR-fullerenes can be described as fullerenes in which each connected cluster of pentagons has size 1.

We studied the combinations of cluster sizes that can occur in fullerenes (and whether the clusters can be at an arbitrarily large distance from each other). For each possible partition of the number 12, we are able to decide whether the partition describes the sizes of pentagon clusters in a possible fullerene.

This is joint work with Gunnar Brinkmann, Patrick W. Fowler, Tomaž Pisanski and Nico Van Cleemput.