Appeal No. 1998-2958
Application No. 08/671,516
While appellant’s response to this rejection is barely substantive, we will, nevertheless, not
sustain the rejection because, in our view, the examiner has simply failed to set forth a prima facie case
of obviousness.
The examiner’s basis for the rejection under 35 U.S.C. § 103 is that Yamamoto provides an
example of calculating air/fuel ratio in internal combustion engines from data provided by exhaust gas
sensors and that it would have been obvious to employ the well-known calculations described in the
instant specification in Yamamoto. However, the examiner never applies the references or the “well-
known” calculations to the instant claim language, so it is difficult to understand how certain claim
limitations are alleged to have been met by the applied references. For example, the examiner does not
indicate what, exactly, is being relied on for the teaching or suggestion of calculating an amount of water
produced by the combustion process based on a selected calculation type and exhaust concentration
data and then calculating an amount of oxygen used in the combustion process based on the amount of
water from the previous calculation and the exhaust gas concentration data and, finally calculating the
air/fuel ratio based on the calculated amount of oxygen.
Moreover, the claims each require the selection of a calculation type from a predetermined set
of calculation types. The examiner alleges (Paper No. 4-page 3) that since each of these “calculation
-5-
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007