Appeal No. 97-2596 Page 7
Application No. 08/319,345
New ground of rejection
Under the provisions of 37 CFR § 1.196(b), we enter the
following new ground of rejection.
Claims 1 through 5 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103 as
being unpatentable over admitted prior art in view of Vaccari and
Morikawa.
Our review of the section entitled "Description of Related
Art" (specification, pp. 2-5) leads us to conclude that one
skilled in the art would have taken the following to be admitted
prior art. A gas turbine engine wherein the rotor blades have a
dovetail root received in dovetail slots of the rotor disk. In
addition, it was known that both the dovetail root of the rotor
blades and the dovetail slots of the rotor disk were subjected to
high stresses and stress risers.
Vaccari discloses that laser shock peening has only recently
become a commercially feasible alternative to shot peening for
enhancing the fatigue life of metal parts. Vaccari teaches that
compared to shot peening, laser shock peening develops at least
equivalent residual compressive stress, but to depths two-to-
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