Appeal No. 2006-2161
Application No. 10/248,326
examiner’s finding that fuel cells and batteries generally
are current generating systems which produce heat (Answer
at 10), there is little, if any, evidence in this record
that one of ordinary skill in the battery art would have
been motivated to look past the differences between fuel
cell stacks and battery cell packs to apply teachings
beneficial to fuel cell cooling systems to electric vehicle
battery packs.
Moreover, Lake’s failure to recognize any problems
associated with its unidirectional cooling system or any
significant temperature differential across conventional
battery cells reasonably suggests that Lake’s battery packs
so differ in design, composition and function from the fuel
cell stacks cooled by Kothmann’s cooling system that persons
having ordinary skill in the art would have had no incentive
or motivation to alter Lake’s system to eliminate problems
peculiar to Kothmann’s fuel cell stacks. While Lake teaches
that electric “vehicle batteries must be cooled,” (Lake,
col. 2, l. 44-45), Lake does not recognize any problems
associated with the unidirectional flow cooling system that
it employs.
Lake is primarily interested in “efficiently reusing
the heat generated by an electric vehicle battery assembly”
by transferring the heat generated from the exothermic
reaction of the battery pack to the HVAC system to
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