Appeal No. 93-1311
Application 07/279,713
We cannot sustain this rejection.
It is the examiner’s fundamental position that it would have
been obvious for one with ordinary skill in the art to replace
the hollow glass beads, which function as a burn-out material to
provide increased porosity, in Jones’ coating (e.g., see lines
49-51 in column 6 and lines 61-65 in column 16) with the hollow
inorganic spheres taught by Beck. However, these references
contain no teaching or suggestion that Beck’s spheres should be
used in a coating environment of any kind much less the coating
of Jones or that Beck’s spheres would be even capable of “burn-
out” as required of Jones’ beads. Stated otherwise, these
references provide no suggestion for combining their teachings in
the manner proposed by the examiner and no suggestion that such a
combination would be successful. In re O’Farrell, 853 F.2d 894,
13902, 7 USPQ2d 1673, 1680-81 (Fed. Cir. 1988).
In this latter regard, it is appropriate to emphasize that a
burn-out material must be physically disposed within a coating in
order to increase coating porosity and that the sphere diameters
disclosed by Beck (e.g., see lines 14-27 in column 3) are
generally larger than the thicknesses of Jones’ coating layers
(e.g., see the layer thicknesses in Tables IV and V). Indeed,
the smallest sphere diameter disclosed by Beck is larger than
3
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