Appeal No. 1996-2893
Application 08/370,153
above modified Boning structure the claimed camera means [answer, page 3, final
rejection, pages 2-4].
The appellants argue that the claimed invention is fundamentally different from the
prior art. The base reference, Boning, is related to a knock sensor. It measures the overall
temperature within the combustion chamber. It could not be used to provide images from
within the combustion chamber. Boning provides only the overall luminosity within the
combustion chamber [brief, page 5]. The appellants further argue that Dietz also is
concerned with a knock sensor device and the disc 6 in figure 1c is not a lens but a plain
disc to merely pass the light through. Dietz only senses the light from combustion, whereas
the claimed invention has a lens that gathers and transmits coherent light from the cylinder
"to provide" an "image" of the "field of view" [ brief, page 6]. Appellants further state that
the use of the camera of Metz in Boning is inappropriate as the Metz camera is used for
inspecting surfaces within the combustion chamber while the engine is not operating [brief,
page 7].
The examiner responds that the probe in Boning does transmit the "image" of
thermal variation in the combustion chamber, and disc 6 of Dietz can be ground to form a
lens [col. 4, lines 10-25] to focus light from the combustion chamber. The examiner further
responds that Metz is used simply to show that a camera can be used to record images of
the inside of a combustion chamber in an internal combustion engine. The examiner
6
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007