DETAILED ACTION
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Response to Amendment
The amendment of claim 20 is supported by the specification.
Any rejections and/or objections made in the previous Office action and not repeated below are hereby withdrawn.
The text of those sections of Title 35, U.S. Code not included in this action can be found in a prior Office action.
The new grounds of rejection set forth below are necessitated by applicant's amendment filed on 5/10/2026. Thus, the following action is properly made final.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
Claims 20-22 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Ni et al (CN 106752724) in view of Ye (CN111073507).
Ni teaches an anticorrosive coating composition comprising 2-5 wt% of a polysilsesquioxane, 3-6 wt% of flaky graphite, 1-3 wt% of a silane coupling agent and 5-10 wt% of water, 5-10wt% of ethanol ether acetate [0008]. It is a common practice to mix all ingredients until a homogeneous mixture is obtained. The graphite dispersed in water and other solvents reads on a graphene slurry as claimed. The cured coating is capable of inhibiting dirt and debris adhesion.
It is noted that claim 20 is a product claim, how each ingredient is mixed and the order of mixing have no patentable weight unless some criticality is of record. The limitation “a graphene slurry in which said graphene is dispersed in a solvent from 0.5 to 80 wt% of the slurry” indicates the graphene and the solvent are mixed before being mixed with other ingredients which is a product by process limitation and has no patentable weight. The weight percent of graphene indicates the weight ratio between graphene and the solvent. As long as the weight ratio of these two ingredients in the composition overlaps the claimed range, it reads on this limitation. However, the composition allows additional solvent to present which would lower the weight content and make the claimed weight content meaningless, because in a composition having more solvent than required to meet the claimed weight ratio, the solvent can be divided into two parts, one part is used to meet the weight content requirement, the other would be the additional solvent.
Ni does not teach the claimed silane.
However, Ye discloses an anticorrosive coating and teaches the silane coupling agent can be amonopropyltriethoxysilane [0002, 0009, 0016]. Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art at the time the invention was made to utilize amonopropyltriethoxysilane as the silane coupling agent for the composition of Ni because it is recognized in the art it is suitable for an anticorrosive coating composition.
Response to Arguments
Applicant's arguments filed 5/10/2026 have been fully considered but they are not persuasive.
In response to applicant's argument that graphene slurry has different structural properties from the flaky graphene, the argument is not persuasive because 1) those two cited non patent literatures (Gerace et al and Dong et al) indicate the features of their carbon nanomaterials including exfoliated, loosely stacking structure and surfactant-treated, which are irrelevant to the claimed graphene; 2) even if the claimed graphene has those features, they are not recited in the rejected claims; 3) the instant specification discloses “the graphene is provided in a powder forms or solvent based slurry” which indicates these forms are interchangeable; 4) applicant argues “the dispersed graphene of the present invention is better separated than that from powders and therefore results in thin flakes of graphene”, please note Ni uses flaky graphene.
Conclusion
Applicant's amendment necessitated the new ground(s) of rejection presented in this Office action. Accordingly, THIS ACTION IS MADE FINAL. See MPEP § 706.07(a). Applicant is reminded of the extension of time policy as set forth in 37 CFR 1.136(a).
A shortened statutory period for reply to this final action is set to expire THREE MONTHS from the mailing date of this action. In the event a first reply is filed within TWO MONTHS of the mailing date of this final action and the advisory action is not mailed until after the end of the THREE-MONTH shortened statutory period, then the shortened statutory period will expire on the date the advisory action is mailed, and any extension fee pursuant to 37 CFR 1.136(a) will be calculated from the mailing date of the advisory action. In no event, however, will the statutory period for reply expire later than SIX MONTHS from the date of this final action.
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/WENWEN CAI/
Primary Examiner, Art Unit 1763
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