Appeal No. 2004-1032 Page 4
Application No. 09/835,510
As pointed out by the examiner (answer, page 6), Melton
establishes the result effectiveness of copper addition in
amounts overlapping the claimed range of addition as illustrated
in Figure 2 of that patent. Given those teachings of Melton
coupled with AbuJudom’s disclosure as discussed above, we
determine that it would have been prima facie obvious to one of
ordinary skill in the art to arrive at a workable alloy including
copper in amounts that would furnish a high temperature shape
memory alloy of suitable properties useful for a variety of
applications with a reasonable expectation of success and, in so
doing, arrive at a Ni, Ti, Cu, Hf containing alloy with a
composition within the ranges, as recited in representative claim
1.1 See In re Woodruff, 919 F.2d 1575, 1578, 16 USPQ2d 1934,
1936-37 (Fed. Cir. 1990) (the determination of workable or even
optimum values for result effective variables would be within the
ambit of one of ordinary skill in the art); See also In re
Boesch, 617 F.2d 272, 276, 205 USPQ 215, 219 (CCPA 1980).
As for the claimed “thin film” requirement, we agree with
the examiner that fabricating the shape memory alloy of AbuJudom
1 We observe that AbuJudom refers to U. S. Patent No.
4,144,057 (Melton) at column 2, lines 4-19 and reasonably
suggests Hf addition as an improvement to such a Ni, Cu, Ti alloy
as generally discussed at columns 3 through 6 of AbuJudom.
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007