Appeal No. 2001-0065
Application 09/048,289
the instant application relate to methods of producing the chemical pulp and a chemical
pulp producing fiber line system.
The Rejections
(A) Claims 18, 1, 3, 4, 13, 14, 16, and 20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. §103(a)
as being unpatentable over AHS ET AL with or without MANNBRO.
In sum, the rejection over Ahs alone (the complete text of which may be found in
the Examiner’s Answer, page 3, line 4 to page 4, line 9) relies upon Ahs to teach
cooking to produce brown stock, washing, oxygen delignifying, screening, and returning
the shive containing reject fraction to the main fiber line before the oxygen reactor. The
rejection concludes it would have been obvious to remove the secondary reactor and
continuously recycle the rejects.
We find that the Examiner has not provided sufficient motivation within Ahs alone
to establish a prima facie case of obviousness. The Examiner has stated, without
elaboration, that:
It would have been obvious to the artisan that the oxygen delignification stage (6)
could be eliminated and the reject recycled directly to the fiber line before the
oxygen reactor (3) and recycled through the reactor (3) several times until the
reject passes through the screen. (Examiner’s Answer, page 3, lines 14-17).
Our review of Ahs fails to show any motivation for removing the reactor (6) from
the process of Ahs. Ahs seems to us to teach towards the inclusion of additional
reactors, up to as many as are necessary. See, e.g. column 2, line 1 (“at least one”),
column 3, lines 36-41 (“If desired, any branch line may be provided with one or more
additional secondary reactors in order to increase the degree of delignification and
relieve the screening apparatus since the number of times a particular bundle of fibers
has to be recirculated can be correspondingly reduced.”)
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