Fusene chains revisited: how kinky they are and why it matters

We refine the enumeration of fusene chains of a given length with respect to the number of turns by constructing bijections between such chains and ternary words. Explicit formulas thus obtained are then used to compute the expected values for the whole class of bond-additive degree-based topological indices over all such chains of a given length. The results are also applicable to several other classes of chemically interesting polycyclic chains, such as, e.g., phenylene and spiro chains.