Appeal No. 2001-0707 Page 4
Application No. 09/068,526
In rejecting claims under 35 U.S.C. § 103, the examiner
bears the initial burden of presenting a prima facie case of
obviousness. See In re Rijckaert, 9 F.3d 1531, 1532, 28
USPQ2d 1955, 1956 (Fed. Cir. 1993). A prima facie case of
obviousness is established by presenting evidence that would
have led one of ordinary skill in the art 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) and In re Lintner, 458 F.2d 1013,
1016, 173 USPQ 560, 562 (CCPA 1972).
Claim 1, the sole independent claim on appeal, reads as
follows:
A method for building a serpentine heat exchanger
(3) being profiled in such a way to present from a
lateral side view and relative to at least one part of
its length an inclination the direction of which is
suddenly or progressively inverted at least once relative
to a plane which is substantially parallel to the general
plane of the heat exchanger (3), said method
characterised by the sequential steps of
(a) bending a pipe into a flat serpentine
configuration (103) consisting of a series of
substantially parallel straight pipe sections (203),
(b) attaching a plurality of wires (303) to each
side of the flat serpentine configuration (103), said
wires (303) extending along the length of the flat
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