Appeal No. 1998-2354
Application 08/054,588
skill in the art. See In re Rinehart, 531 F.2d 1048, 1051,
189 USPQ 143, 147 (CCPA 1976). The mere fact that the prior
art could be modified as proposed by the examiner is not
sufficient to establish a prima facie case of obviousness.
See In re Fritch, 972 F.2d 1260, 1266, 23 USPQ2d 1780, 1783
(Fed. Cir. 1992).
Edlund’s teaching, rather than being a general teaching
regarding the use of gas pressure to transport pulp, is a
specific teaching of using added gas pressure to discharge
cooked lignocellulose material from a digester. The examiner
argues that Edlund teaches the critical issue of using gas
pressure to transport pulp (answer, page 7), but has not
established that one of ordinary skill in the art would have
been led by the applied prior art itself to combine a teaching
directed toward discharging cooked lignocellulose material
from a digester with a teaching of bleaching pulp. Moreover,
although Tsai’s first mixer is under a pressure of up to 100
psig, the examiner has not established that one of ordinary
skill in the art would have considered the flow rate of gas,
even if there is no off-gassing, to be adequate to transport
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