Appeal No. 2006-0945
Application No. 10/245,888
The second embodiment (Narita II) taught by Narita teaches the use of testing whether an air
conditioner is off or on and adding an adjustment for the driving load of an air conditioner into
the computation of the coasting lockup capacity. As noted by both the Appellant and the
examiner, this Narita embodiment does not specifically discuss learning capacity.
It is clear that that the specific embodiment relying on the air conditioner load, shown in
Narita Fig. 9, is different from the embodiment incorporating learning in look up tables , shown
in Narita Figs. 5 to 7.
However, it is well settled that a reference is useable for what it would have taught or
suggested to a person of ordinary skill in the art, and is not narrowly confined to the specific
structures and procedures shown in the embodiments. We note that Narita provides a suggestion
for incorporating the features for each of these two embodiments, and that combining these
features would have been well within the level of a person of ordinary skill in the art.
In particular, Narita provides the motivation for applying a learning look up table to
determining coasting lock-up capacity as follows:
Since the application capacity of the lock-up clutch determined for the coasting
drive is a fixed value previously obtained by experiments and others in the
above-described embodiment, the application capacity cannot be a minimum
lock-up clutch application capacity within such a range that no slip of the
torque converter 3 occurs due to a difference in individual vehicles or a
variation in driving conditions, and there may arise a problem that the above-
mentioned effects cannot be properly achieved.
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