Appeal No. 2003-0094 Page 6
Application No. 08/995,786
emissions, high efficiency power generation and enhanced electrical generating
capacity,” with reference to Wolfe at “col. 8, lines 30 and following” (Answer, page 4).
The examiner has not pointed out where Wolfe sets forth these advantages of adding a
fuel cell to a combustor, and we find no such teachings. Our review reveals only
mention that the generator “boosts the voltage of the fuel cell” (column 8, line 41), that
the integration of the fuel cell, the turbine, the compressor and the generator provide
“high efficiency power generation” (column 8, lines 53-55), that the fuel cell and the
generator “complement each other to produce a desirable power output” (column 10,
lines 20-22), and that the combustor brings the system up to a pressure at which the
fuel cell exhaust supplies heat to the turbine, completes the reaction of partially-reacted
fuel and oxidizer streams emanating from the fuel cell, and increases the temperature
of the incoming gases to the turbine (column 10, lines 37-45). These factors hardly
support the aforementioned reasons given by the examiner for adding a fuel cell
upstream of the combustor but rather, from our perspective, provide justification for the
opposite, that is, adding a combustor downstream of a fuel cell to increase the
efficiency of a system in which a fuel cell provides the primary power.
The mere fact that the prior art structure could be modified does not make such
a modification obvious unless the prior art suggests the desirability of doing so. See In
re Gordon, 733 F.2d 900, 902, 221 USPQ 1125, 1127 (Fed. Cir. 1984). While the
Singleton system provides cool air and does so by driving a turbine by means of heat
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