Appeal No. 96-3874
Application 08/308,186
26 for the individual printing towers are a problem in the sense
that they cause damaging vibrations as a result of pressure
pulsations in the dampening liquid.
Furthermore, even if we were to assume that one of ordinary
skill in the art would have been motivated by the collective
teachings of the applied references to provide an accumulator in
the system of Smith, there remains the issue of where one would
locate the accumulator. In that Plager, Miller and Pirsch teach
that the source of the pressure pulsations is the system pump, it
appears to us that, at best, in following the teachings of these
references the ordinarily skilled artisan would locate the
accumulator upstream of Smith’s pressure regulator 130 in order
to place the accumulator as close as possible to the source of
the pressure pulsations. However, appealed claim 6 calls to the
accumulator to be located downstream of the pressure regulator
next to the spray bar. This is presumably because, as set forth
in appellants’ specification in the sentence bridging pages 6 and
7, the constantly changing pressure pulses are created by the
on/off cycling of the spray bar nozzle valve operators. The
examiner has not addressed this location issue raised by
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Last modified: November 3, 2007