Appeal No. 95-0339
Application 07/881,941
is applicable to liquids, gases and mixtures thereof (col. 4,
lines 6-8), would have had a reasonable expectation that the
method would be applicable to a supercritical fluid.
Regarding appellant’s claim requirement of a means or step
for maintaining the pressure in the measurement zone at or below
that required to convert the sample stream into a gas while the
contaminants remain in non-gaseous form and are deposited on an
attenuated total reflectance plate, the examiner argues that “as
Pujado et al discloses separating the contaminant from the
supercritical fluid carrier by pressure release, one would have
found it obvious to obtain the contaminant in the manner taught
by Pujado et al., thereby isolating the contaminant from the
fluid” (answer, page 5).
We do not find this argument to be convincing because the
examiner has provided no explanation, and it is not apparent
to us, why Pujado’s teaching of removing contaminants from an
aqueous stream by dissolving them into a supercritical solvent
and then removing the contaminants from the solvent at sub-
critical conditions, would have motivated one of ordinary skill
in the art to separate the contaminants from a supercritical
fluid when detecting contaminants in a sample of that fluid by
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