Appeal No. 96-2354
Application No. 08/147,086
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 appellant's disclosure. See, for example,
Uniroyal, Inc. v. Rudkin-Wiley Corp., 837 F.2d 1044, 1052, 5
USPQ2d 1434, 1052 (Fed. Cir.), cert. denied, 488 U.S. 825
(1988).
The preamble of claim 15, the sole independent claim,
states that the claim is directed to a device for holding
catalyst in a vertical type radial flow reactor. The
examiner’s rejection of claim 15 is predicated upon the
teachings of four references. The first of these is Anderson
which, in our view, suffers from a number of serious defects
in its role as the primary reference. The first of these is
that it does not disclose a radial flow reactor, as is
required by the appellant’s claim 15. In addition, Anderson
fails to disclose or teach that the catalyst containers are
removable, much less that they are sized to be removable
through an opening in the reactor. Also, in the Anderson
design, the catalyst containers are rectangular, rather than
being shaped as arcs of a cylinder. Finally, the inner and
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