Appeal No. 1998-3168
Application No. 08/420,730
Appellant relies upon the Declaration of Carl L. Elmore,
one of the inventors of the applied Elmore reference, as
evidence of nonobviousness. Mr. Elmore states at page 2 of
the Declaration that "I did not look upon the '157 patent as
including a method or apparatus for producing steam having
less NCG than steam produced by conventional black liquor
flashing." In response to this Declaration, the examiner1
withdrew a rejection under 35 U.S.C. § 102 over Elmore.
However, while the declarant states in the sentence bridging
pages 4 and 5 of the Declaration that "in 1995 it would have
been very desirable to be able to have a method of producing
steam from hot black liquor that contained relatively little
sulfur NCG, particularly for use in steaming incoming wood
chips," the Declaration fails to present any evidence or even
opinion that the claimed method of producing a purer form of
steam would have been nonobvious to one of ordinary skill in
the art, particularly in light of the Dean disclosure. The
declarant offers no opinion regarding how one of ordinary
skill in the art, at the time of filing the present
application, would have interpreted the disclosure of Dean.
1NCG is an acronym for non-condensible gas.
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