Appeal No. 2000-0119
Application 08/785,711
bricks marked Birmingham, Texas and Nashville “have a high
porosity of about 32%” (page 296, col. 2).
Based on the foregoing, we consider that it would have
been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art at the time of
appellants’ invention to dispose of porous “ceramic” construction
materials, such as brick, using the method set forth in Grube, so
as to achieve the advantage described in Grube, i.e, fragmenta-
tion and comminution of such waste construction materials so that
they will form a more dense packing when disposed in land fill
operations. Thus, appellants’ method as set forth in claims 8,
9 and 13 on appeal would have been obvious within the meaning of
35 U.S.C. § 103, based on the collective teachings of Grube and
the Robinson article.
Other patents of record, e.g., U.S. Patent No.
4,313,737 to Massey et al., disclose explosive expansion
fragmentation of porous materials without the use of chemical
reactions, which processes are capable of producing “a suspension
of micron sized solid particles in vapor” (col. 9, lines 30-32).
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