Appeal No. 2006-1959 Page 5
Application No. 10/293,711
In light of the above, the rejection of claim 1, as well as claims 9 and 13 standing or
falling therewith, is sustained. Inasmuch as the appellants have not separately argued the
patentability of claims 6, 8, 12, 18, 20 and 21 apart from claim 1, the rejection of these claims as
being unpatentable over Amir in view of Hanna and Hay is also sustained (see In re Young, 927
F.2d 588, 590, 18 USPQ2d 1089, 1091 (Fed. Cir. 1991); In re Wood, 582 F.2d 638, 642, 199
USPQ 137, 140 (CCPA 1978)).
With regard to the rejection of claims 7 and 19 as being unpatentable over Amir in view
of Hanna and Hay, the appellants’ only argument is that, “although the Hay reference does
disclose a rankine cycle being heated by the waste heat from an internal combustion engine 12 it
does not show or suggest the extraction of heat from the exhaust of an internal combustion
[engine] as recited in claims 7 and 19” (brief, p. 7). This argument is not well taken in light of
Hay’s express discussion (col. 1, ll. 27-31) in the background section of the patent of waste heat
recovery systems in which “hot engine coolant and hot engine exhaust gas are circulated through
heat exchangers to vaporize a working fluid before the same enters a vapor engine for providing
extra power to the main internal combustion engine.” In view of this well-known practice of
recovering heat from the hot engine coolant and exhaust gas of internal combustion engines, it
would have been obvious to utilize the organic Rankine cycle of Amir to recover heat from
either the hot engine coolant or exhaust from an internal combustion engine. The rejection is
sustained.
The rejection of claims 2, 3, 101, 14 and 15 as being unpatentable over Amir in view of
Hanna and Brasz, however, is not sustained. The examiner’s rejection of these claims is
grounded in part on the examiner’s determination that it would have been obvious to a person
having ordinary skill in the art “to use diffuser having vane, pipe and frustoconical shape in
Amir et al as taught by Brasz for the purpose of achieving appropriate work input due to the
1 The examiner’s inclusion of claim 10 in this rejection without also including claim 11 from which it depends is
somewhat puzzling, but this is of no moment in light of our disposition of this rejection.
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