Appeal No. 2002-0139 Page 5
Application No. 08/991,572
therefor. Higuchi discloses pigment wet cake processing in an
extrusion apparatus. The examiner has not established that one
of ordinary skill in the art would have been led to modify the
apparatus of Higuchi by employing the controller of Wesley
therein for starve feeding with respect to the disparate
extrusion apparatus of Higuchi so as to arrive at the claimed
invention.
The examiner (answer, page 5) maintains that Wesley’s
teaching of preventing solid plugging via the use of the starve
feeding controller is applicable to Higuchi’s apparatus since
Higuchi is also concerned with plugging at the feed section of
the apparatus. However, that position of the examiner has not
been adequately developed to establish the prima facie
obviousness of such a modification. In this regard, we note that
the plugging problem that is of concern to Higuchi (column 7,
lines 53-60) related to dough formation when a second agent
(organic liquid) was allowed to contact the pigment and first
agent (water) at the feed port whereas the plugging problem
addressed by Wesley (paragraph bridging columns 1 and 2) was the
result of premature heating and cross linking of fine particles
of organosilicon preceramic polymers. The examiner has not
established that one of ordinary skill in the art would have
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