Appeal 2007-0738
Application 11/109,274
rejections are well-founded and supported by the prior art reference relied
upon. Accordingly, we will sustain the Examiner's rejections.
We consider first the Examiner's rejection under § 102. There is no
dispute that DiChiara, like Appellants, discloses treating a porous ceramic
body with an aqueous composition comprising boron and then drying the
porous body to remove the water and leave boron within the pores of the
body. DiChiara discloses that the source of boron can be an aqueous
composition of boron carbide or boron nitride (see col. 3, ll. 34-40).
A principal argument of the Appellants is that the reference does not
describe within the meaning of § 102 that the source of boron is uniformly
distributed within the porous ceramic body. Appellants point to DiChiara's
incorporation by reference of US Patent Nos. 5,702,761 and 5,928,775 to
DiChiara for an illustration that the boron is not distributed uniformly
throughout the ceramic body, i.e., from it surface to its core. However, we
do not interpret the present claim language as requiring the same
concentration of boron at the surface and at the core of the ceramic body,
i.e., throughout the porous ceramic body. Rather, the claims only require
that there is a uniform distribution within the ceramic body. Hence, since
the patent drawings referenced by Appellants illustrate a substantially
uniform distribution within different thicknesses of the ceramic body, we
find that such uniform distribution in DiChiara meets the requirement of the
appealed claims. It can be seen in the patent drawings that the boron is
substantially uniformly distributed within a certain depth from the surface of
the body.
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