The staggering of hexagonal corneocytes is, in itself, quite remarkable. The effects this 3-d nature has on the barrier function of the skin is one of the main goals of this project. During early work we discussed the "shoot through routes" and whether they were important or not, especially given the "average path length" can't be drawn in the same way it can for staggered 2-d cases.

The only way to work it out is to have a go. These pictures are only for steady state cases with impermeable corneocytes. The top two pictures show the geometry of the domain, in terms of the corneocytes, and the shoot through route from the top - the staggering in this case is 0.5 in the y-direction. Next comes a view of the steady-state solution profile, followed by a couple of pictures of the flux in and out of the domain, from the top and the bottom. The last two are the solution and flux (in) for the fully aligned case.

The pictures are clear about where the flux comes out. What they don't say is:

Case	Flux out
Aligned	0.074
50% y-stagger	0.055

There is also a movie of another arangement with a circular source.

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