Appeal No. 95-1849
Application 07/681,527
972, 973 (BPAI 1985). To this end, the requisite motivation must
stem from some teaching, suggestion or inference in the prior art
as a whole or from the knowledge generally available to one of
ordinary skill in the art and not from the appellants’
disclosure. See, for example, Uniroyal, Inc. v. Rudkin-Wiley
Corp., 837 F.2d 1044, 1052, 5 USPQ2d 1434, 1439 (Fed. Cir.),
cert. denied, 488 U.S. 825 (1988).
The appellants' invention is directed to a method of
"freeing a liquid from a substance dispersed therein and having a
larger density than the liquid" (claim 1, lines 1 and 2). The
claim recites three steps, the first of which is feeding the
liquid into a centrifugal separator
having a rotor rotated in a predetermined direction
about a rotational axis, the rotor having a stack of at
least partly conical separation disks arranged
coaxially with the rotor for rotation therewith and
being axially spaced from each other and spacing means
positioned between and bridging the spaces between the
separation disks and delimiting several separate flow
paths in each space between adjacent disks (lines 3
through 8).
The second step requires
conducting the liquid to the inlet parts of said flow
paths and further conducting the liquid through each of
the flow paths in a direction having one radial
component and one component in the circumferential
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