Appeal No. 1997-0844
Application No. 08/269,979
“continuously acidic process water” produced from at least one
of several listed process steps. However, there are no
amounts of (a) and (b) recited in claim 28. Therefore, the
mixture of claim 28 encompasses nearly neutral waters as
disclosed by Zibrida. Accordingly, the examiner has met the
initial burden of establishing that the product of Zibrida
would have reasonably appeared to be identical or only
slightly different from the product recited in claim 28,
regardless of any process limitations recited in the claim.
For the foregoing reasons, we determine that the examiner
has met the initial burden of proof and appellants have failed
to rebut the examiner’s evidence of obviousness. Accordingly,
the rejection of claim 28 is sustained.
C. The Rejection of Claim 25
Claim 25 is written in a Jepson-type format, with the
improvement in wet-process manufacturing of phosphoric acid
comprising using the process water of claim 18 in washing the
waste gypsum filter cake. See 37 CFR § 1.75(e).
The examiner rejects claim 25 over a combination of
Davister and Zibrida, with the finding that Davister discloses
a wet process for making phosphoric acid and teaches that the
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