Appeal No. 1998-1772 Page 6
Application No. 08/578,047
skill in the art that would have led that individual to
combine the relevant teachings of the references to arrive at
the claimed invention. See In re Fine, 837 F.2d 1071, 1074, 5
USPQ2d 1596, 1598 (Fed. Cir. 1988).
With this as background, we turn to the examiner's new
ground of rejection of the claims on appeal (answer, pp. 3-4).
The examiner determined the teachings of Brooks and then
concluded that
Brooks substantially shows the invention as claimed
except that the semi-solid mass is not injected into a
die cavity and that the semi-solid mass is not moved away
from the molten stream as the semi-solid mass is
collected.
The examiner then determined that Sato "shows to inject semi-
solid mass into a die cavity to form a die casting product"
and that Ashok teaches "to maintain 5-50% volume fraction of
solid in the semi-solid mass during disrupting and partial
solidification process by maintaining a constant cooling zone
distance through moving the mold 46 or hot top 62, both are
considered as a container." The examiner then concluded from
the combined teachings of the applied prior art that it would
have been obvious to (1) inject the semi-solid mass of Brooks
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007