Appeal No. 1997-2344
Application No. 08/273,550
The appealed claims stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103
as unpatentable over Hwo.
Because we agree with the examiner’s conclusion that the
subject matter defined by appealed claims 1 through 4, 7, and
9 would have been obvious to a person with ordinary skill in
the art, we sustain the rejection as to these claims. We
cannot sustain the rejection of claims 6, 8, and 10, however.
As evident from the representative claims reproduced
above, the subject matter on appeal is generally directed to
the use of a defined “nucleating package,” composed of 1) a
high melt flow polypropylene and 2) stearamide, to promote
crystallization from the melt of a semi-crystalline polyolefin
copolymer, such as a butene-1-ethylene copolymer.
At the outset, we observe that it is well known that
certain additions of materials referred to as “foreign
substances”, added to a polymer melt in finely divided form,
serve as “nucleating agents” for the subsequent
crystallization of the polymers during cooling in a mold.
These materials are also known to favorably influence the
crystalline structure of the molded thermoplastic material.
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