Appeal No. 1998-1258 Page 3 Application No. 08/442,676 OPINION In reaching our decision in this appeal, we have given careful consideration to the appellants’ specification and claims, to the applied prior art references, and to the respective positions articulated by the appellants and the examiner. As a consequence of our review, we make the determinations which follow. Independent claim 17 is directed to a method of loading a plurality of doses of a predetermined amount of particulate material into the apertures of a plate. The method comprises the steps of supporting the plate on a porous bed in such a position that the apertures communicate with a reservoir of an excess amount of particulate material, exerting sufficient gaseous pressure on the material to cause it to fill the apertures, with the porous bed allowing gas to escape while preventing the particulate material from being expelled, and separating the filled apertures from the reservoir. The examiner is of the view that the subject matter of this claim is unpatentable on the basis of the combined teachings of Boyhan and Ulveling. In particular, it is his position that Boyhan teaches all of the features of the claim except for the packaging of particulate material and the use of pressurized gas to force it into the apertures, but that it would have been obvious to utilize the Boyhan bottom plate “with reduced components and a middle plate with correspondingly reduced holes to pass a supply of powdered material from a supply into said compartments in order to evenly distribute the powder into individual compartmentsPage: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 NextLast modified: November 3, 2007