UNITED TECHNOLOGIES CORPORATION

Patent Trials and Appeals Board

Aug 27, 2020

14917855 - (D) (P.T.A.B. Aug. 27, 2020)

UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE
United States Patent and Trademark Office
Address: COMMISSIONER FOR PATENTS
P.O. Box 1450
Alexandria, Virginia 22313-1450
www.uspto.gov
APPLICATION NO. FILING DATE FIRST NAMED INVENTOR ATTORNEY DOCKET NO. CONFIRMATION NO.
14/917,855 03/09/2016 Brooks E. Snyder 67097-2674PUS1;73930US02 6471
54549 7590 08/27/2020
CARLSON, GASKEY & OLDS/PRATT & WHITNEY
400 West Maple Road
Suite 350
Birmingham, MI 48009
EXAMINER
HASAN, SABBIR
ART UNIT PAPER NUMBER
3745
NOTIFICATION DATE DELIVERY MODE
08/27/2020 ELECTRONIC
Please find below and/or attached an Office communication concerning this application or proceeding.
The time period for reply, if any, is set in the attached communication.
Notice of the Office communication was sent electronically on above-indicated "Notification Date" to the
following e-mail address(es):
ptodocket@cgolaw.com
PTOL-90A (Rev. 04/07)
UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
BEFORE THE PATENT TRIAL AND APPEAL BOARD
Ex parte BROOKS E. SNYDER and THOMAS N. SLAVENS
Appeal 2020-000728
Application 14/917,855
Technology Center 3700
Before ANNETTE R. REIMERS, CARL M. DEFRANCO, and
GEORGE R. HOSKINS, Administrative Patent Judges.
DEFRANCO, Administrative Patent Judge.
DECISION ON APPEAL
STATEMENT OF THE CASE
Pursuant to 35 U.S.C. § 134(a), Appellant1 appeals from the
Examiner’s decision to reject claims 1–17. We have jurisdiction under
35 U.S.C. § 6(b).
We AFFIRM.

1 We use the word “Appellant” to refer to “applicant” as defined in 37
C.F.R. § 1.42(a). Appellant identifies the real party in interest as Raytheon
Technologies Corporation. Appeal Br. 1; Update filed Apr. 23, 2020.

Appeal 2020-000728
Application 14/917,855

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CLAIMED SUBJECT MATTER
Of the claims on appeal, claims 1 and 13 are independent. Claim 1 is
directed to a gas turbine engine comprising a “component,” while claim 13
is directed to the “engine component” itself. Claim 1 is illustrative and
reproduced below.
1. A gas turbine engine, comprising:

a component having a first wall and a second wall spaced-
apart from the first wall, and a cooling passageway provided in
part by a helical wall between the first wall and the second wall,
wherein the second wall is substantially hollow and provides a
core passageway.
Claims App. 8 (emphasis added).
EVIDENCE OF RECORD
Name Reference Date
Bailly US 5,993,156 Nov. 30, 1999
Tibbott US 9,206,697 B2 Dec. 8, 2015

EXAMINER’S REJECTIONS
Appellant appeals from the Examiner’s Final Office Action, dated
March 21, 2019, which includes the following rejection:
Claims Rejected 35 U.S.C. § Basis
1–17 103 Bailly, Tibbott

ANALYSIS
A. Independent Claims 1 and 13
Appellant argues independent claims 1 and 13 together. See Appeal
Br. 3; Reply Br. 1. In particular, Appellant argues that claims 1 and 13 are
allowable over the asserted combination of Bailly and Tibbott because
“Bailly is a vane” and “Tibbott, on the other hand, is a blade.” Appeal Br. 4.
“Bailly being a vane,” Appellant contends, means it “does not have any ‘tip
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Application 14/917,855

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geometry’ that would benefit from Tibbott’s hollow pillar.” Id. at 4–5; see
also Reply Br. 2 (same). Thus, according to Appellant, “Tibbott’s teaching
of a hollow pillar does not extend to vanes” and a skilled artisan “would not
have modified Bailly in view of Tibbott as the Examiner suggests.” Appeal
Br. 5; see also id. at 4 (“there is no rational reason . . . to modify Bailly in
view of Tibbott”).
We disagree with Appellant. The evidence fully supports the
Examiner’s findings that the combination of Bailly and Tibbott teaches each
of the recited limitations of claims 1 and 13 and that a skilled artisan would
have been led to modify the central core 32 of the helical cooling passage 30
of Bailly’s turbine blade by incorporating Tibbott’s teaching that the helical
cooling passage 52a of a turbine blade may be provided with a “hollow”
core 61 in order to provide cooling directly to the tip of the airfoil. See Exr.
Ans. 8–9 (citing Tibbott, 7:66–8:2, Fig. 11).
Moreover, contrary to Appellant’s argument, we agree with the
Examiner’s finding that Bailly relates to the cooling of both turbine engine
vanes and blades exposed to high-temperature combustion gases. See Exr.
Ans. 3–7; Bailly, 1:4–24. For instance, Bailly discloses “a hollow airfoil or
blade wall” comprising four distinct zones:
a rounded leading edge 5 facing the hot gas flow from the engine
combustion chamber, a tapered trailing edge 6 remote from the
leading edge and connected to it by a concave side wall 7 denoted
the “high-pressure side” and a convex side wall 8 denoted the
“low-pressure side” spaced from the wall 7.

Bailly, 2:66–3:8, Fig. 1. That description of Bailly’s “airfoil or blade wall”
is essentially identical to Appellant’s description of the claimed invention in
terms of an “airfoil wall”:
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The airfoil section 66 is primarily defined by an airfoil
wall 70, which provides a leading edge 72, a trailing edge 74, and
opposed pressure and suction sides 76, 78 extending between the
leading edge 72 and the trailing edge 74. In this example the
airfoil wall 70 is a gas path wall, in that an exterior surface of the
airfoil wall 70 will be exposed to a core air flow C during engine
operation.

Spec. ¶ 43 (emphases added). Thus, we reject the notion that Bailly’s
“airfoil or blade wall” (Bailly, 2:67–3:1) would not benefit from Tibbott’s
teaching of providing a hollow pillar in the cooling cavity of “an aerofoil
component of a gas turbine engine” (Tibbott, 1:5–6).
In other words, we agree with the Examiner that Tibbott’s teaching of
providing a hollow core 61 for the helical cooling passage 52a in a turbine
blade is directly applicable to the central core 32 and helical cooling passage
30 of Bailly’s turbine engine airfoil or blade, which otherwise meets the
limitations of claims 1 and 13. Compare Bailly, Figs. 3–8, with Tibbott,
Figs. 11, 12. Given that Bailly and Tibbott each disclose a cooling cavity
along the leading edge of an airfoil/blade wall (that includes a central core
and helical passage), we are persuaded that a skilled artisan would have been
led to incorporate Tibbott’s teaching of a hollow core into the central core 32
of Bailly’s helical cooling passageway 30 in order to provide additional
cooling capacity to the tip of Bailly’s airfoil/blade and would have done so
with a reasonable expectation of success in arriving at the claimed invention.
Because we are not persuaded by Appellant’s arguments to the contrary, we
sustain the Examiner’s rejection of independent claims 1 and 13 as
unpatentable over the combined teachings of Bailly and Tibbott.
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B. The Dependent Claims
Appellant argues several of the dependent claims separately, namely,
dependent claims 6 and 8, which stem from claim 1, and dependent claim
16, which stems from claim 13. We begin with dependent claim 6.
1. Claim 6
Dependent claim 6 recites that “the cross-sectional area of the cooling
passageway [i.e., the helical passageway between the first and second walls]
is greater adjacent a trailing edge of the component than a leading edge of
the component.” Claims App. 8. The Examiner rejected claim 6 as
unpatentable over Bailly and Tibbott, focusing on Bailly’s teaching that
“[t]he central body, or core 32, of the [helical] ramp 30 is not necessarily
cylindrical, and its cross-section may vary over its height in order to
selectively control the cooling-air passage cross-section to regulate the
values of heat-exchange coefficients.” Final Act. 5 (citing Bailly, 3:61–65)
(emphasis added). Appellant responds that the Examiner relies “on
principles of inherency—improperly—in a strained effort to apply Bailly’s
teachings to the claims.” Appeal Br. 6; see also Reply Br. 3 (“the Examiner
is improperly relying on inherency”).
We disagree. The Examiner clearly explains that Bailly’s disclosure
of selectively varying the size and shape of core 32 necessarily results in the
helical cooling passageway 11, 30 having a variety of cross-sectional areas
across its span. See Final Act. 5–6; Exr. Ans. 9; Bailly, Figs. 3–10. By
varying the cross-sectional area of the helical passageway, the Examiner
reasons that “[a]t least one cross section of the cooling-passageway would
therefore be greater adjacent a trailing edge of the blade than a leading
edge.” Exr. Ans. 9–10. In our view, that finding by the Examiner does not
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call on principles of inherency to support Bailly’s disclosure of the claim 6
limitation, as Appellant argues, but instead relies on what a skilled artisan
would have reasonably understood from Bailly’s teaching of “selectively
control[ling]” the cross-sectional area of the passageway “to regulate the
values of heat-exchange coefficients.” See Bailly, 3:61–65. That teaching
by Bailly is essentially the same as Appellant’s reason for varying the cross-
sectional area of the claimed helical passageway—
[t]he cross-sectional area of the first and second helical
passageways 94, 96 affects the level of heat transfer between the
flows S2-1, S2-2 and the airfoil wall 70 . . . one can tailor the cross-
sectional area of the helical passageways 94, 96 to selectively
increase and decrease the level of cooling along the airfoil
section 66.

Spec. ¶ 55. Thus, we sustain the Examiner’s rejection of claim 6 as
unpatentable over Bailly and Tibbott.
2. Dependent Claims 8 and 16
Dependent claim 8 recites that the engine component includes “a
leading edge cooling passageway provided between a leading edge of the
component and a lateral divider adjacent the leading edge.” Claims App. 9
(emphasis added). Dependent claim 16 includes essentially the same
limitation. Id. at 10. Appellant argues that the Examiner reads the claimed
“lateral divider adjacent the leading edge” in an overly broad manner on
Bailly’s “right-hand divider 10” rather than on “another divider 10 (the left-
hand divider) [that] is closer to the leading edge.” Reply Br. 3–4
(referencing the Examiner’s annotation of Figure 1 of Bailly, as depicted on
page 12 of the Examiner’s Answer). According to Appellant, a skilled
artisan would not interpret the “adjacent” term of the claims “so broadly,”
given the description of the lateral divider in Appellant’s Specification and
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the fact that Bailly’s left-hand divider 10 is “closer to the leading edge” than
Bailly’s right-hand divider 10 on which the Examiner reads claims 8 and 16.
Id.
We do not find Appellant’s argument persuasive. Appellant’s
Specification merely describes the lateral dividers as “adjacent the leading
edge” and “adjacent the trailing edge” and that they “bound leading and
trailing edge cooling passageways.” Spec. ¶ 49. Nowhere does the
Specification further limit the proximity of the lateral dividers relative to the
cooling passageway in each of the leading and trailing edge portions of the
blade. See Spec. ¶¶ 46, 49, 50, 54. Thus, under the broadest reasonable
interpretation, we find that the term “adjacent,” when read in the context of
the claim language and the Specification, is properly construed to mean
“nearby,” “next to,” or “adjoining” the leading edge. See Merriam-
Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th ed., at 14 (2000). Bailly meets that
definition by disclosing that both of the lateral divider walls 10 are situated
in the “upstream” portion of the airfoil, i.e., “near the leading edge,” while
only Bailly’s lateral divider wall 14 is disclosed as being situated in the
“downstream” portion of the airfoil, i.e., “near the trailing edge.” Bailly,
3:9–19. Given that disclosure, we agree with the Examiner that Bailly’s
right-hand divider wall 10 meets the claim language as properly construed.
Thus, we sustain the Examiner’s rejection of claim 8 and 16.
3. Dependent Claims 2–5, 7, 9–12, and 14, 15, and 17
To refute the rejection of the other dependent claims, Appellant
argues that they “should be allowed for at least the reason that they depend
from an allowable base claim.” Appeal Br. 7. As explained above in our
analysis of the rejection of base claims 1 and 13, we do not find Appellant’s
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reasoning persuasive. Accordingly, we sustain the Examiner’s rejection of
dependent claims 2–5, 7, 9–12, and 14, 15, and 17.
CONCLUSION
The Examiner’s rejection of claims 1–17 is AFFIRMED.
DECISION SUMMARY
Claims
Rejected
35 U.S.C. § Basis Affirmed Reversed
1–17 103 Bailly, Tibbott 1–17

TIME PERIOD FOR RESPONSE
No time period for taking any subsequent action in connection with
this appeal may be extended under 37 C.F.R. § 1.136(a). See 37 C.F.R.
§ 1.136(a)(1)(iv).
AFFIRMED