Appeal 2007-0910 Application 10/108,807 and into the water, which can then be discarded or filtered for reuse. … … recent developments in the area of spun-bonded fiber production have resulted in the creation of nonwoven fabrics with improved drape, hand, and moisture absorption characteristics ("hand" typically describes the tactile qualities of a fabric such as softness, firmness, elasticity, etc.). For example, U.S. Patent Nos. 5,899,785 and 5,970,583, both assigned to Firma Carl Freudenberg, describe a spun-bonded nonwoven lap of very fine continuous filament and the process for making such nonwoven lap using traditional spun-bonded nonwoven manufacturing techniques. Such references disclose, as important raw materials, spun-bonded composite, or multi- component, fibers that are longitudinally splittable by mechanical or chemical action into microdenier size individual fibers. However, while this nonwoven production process may be cheaper and simpler than a comparable knitted or woven process, the fabric produced therein would likely need to be processed at a cleanroom laundry to meet the requirements for end-use products, such as, for examples, wipers for a cleanroom or a paintroom. [Emphasis added.] Given the advantage of employing nonwoven fabric wipes and the need for and recognition of removing ion contaminants via a deionized water wash, we determine that one of ordinary skill in the art would have been led to employ a deionized water wash in the nonwoven fabric wipes suggested by the applied prior art references, motivated by a reasonable expectation of successfully removing a desired amount of ion contaminants, such as those claimed, for use as cleanroom wipers. See KSR Int’l Co. v. Teleflex, Inc., 127 S. Ct. at 1739, 82 USPQ2d at 1395 (“The combination of familiar elements according to known methods is likely to be obvious when it does no more than yield predictable results.”). This is especially true in this case 7Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Next
Last modified: September 9, 2013