Appeal No. 2000-1961
Application 08/840,200
this is not so. Claim 16 does not preclude baseline data from
being measured "on-line" and stored for later comparison with
test data measured "on-line" at a later time. We find this
measurement of baseline data from the working check valve
assembly meets the limitation of "determining, on-line, a time-
based baseline data set for said operating characteristic
representative of a normal sequence of on-line operations of said
control mechanism." Appellants' arguments that "[t]he baseline
[in Hill] is not changed during the on-line operation of the
valve" (Br5) and "[n]o provision is illustrated or described in
the Hill disclosure for modifying the value of the baseline
parameters loaded into the CPU RAM" (Br6) are not commensurate in
scope with the claim because claim 16 says nothing about the
baseline changing after it has been determined. Thus, we find
that the rejection of claim 16 over Hill has not been shown to be
in error. The rejection of claim 16 over Hill is sustained.
Hale teaches establishing baseline running conditions,
baseline running conditions being defined as near to normal,
non-degraded running conditions as possible for the valve
(claim 1). The baseline condition is to be similar to the normal
conditions at which the motor operated valve (MOV) operates
during valve-in-use trending (col. 4, lines 38-40). This
indicates that if valve-in-use trending values are taken under
dynamic ("on-line") conditions, baseline measurements are also
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