DETAILED ACTION
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
Claim(s) 1-4 and 6-8 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Sung (US2020/00212749A1) in view of Harada (JP2003317547A).
Regarding claims 1, 4 and 6, Sung discloses a method for manufacturing a stator (100, Figs. 3-6) including a stator core (110, Figs. 3-6) and a coil portion (150, Figs. 3-6) disposed in the stator core, the method comprising: a disposing step for disposing the coil portion in the stator core (see [0097]). The coil portion includes a segment conductor (210, Fig. 4 and 9A) including a pair of slot housing portions (221a, 222a, Fig. 9A; see [0109]) to be housed in different slots (114, Fig. 3) of the stator core and a coil end portion (230a, Fig. 9A) connecting the pair of slot housing portions. The method comprises a bending step (see “bending” in [0097]) for bending the segment conductor, wherein the cross section forming step is performed, before the bending step, on a part of the segment conductor that is not bent in the bending step (the hairpins are formed by bending wire having rectangular section). However, Sung does not discloses details pertaining to how the magnet wire having rectangular cross section is formed.
Pertinent to claim 1, Harada discloses (see [0013] and [0019]) a process of forming a magnet wire 10 (Figs. 1 and 9) having a rectangular cross-section, the process comprising:
a cross section forming step for forming a sectional shape of the magnet wire 1’ by compressing the wire 1;
a coating step for applying an insulation coating 104a to the wire 1’;
a common heat treatment step for performing, after the cross section forming step and the coating step, by the same heat treatment (in annealing and insulation coating baking furnace 105), annealing of the wire 1’ whose sectional shape has been formed in the cross section forming step and baking of the insulation coating applied to the wire in the coating step; and
Pertinent to claim 2, Harada discloses the common heat treatment step (in furnace 105) is a step of performing the heat treatment at a temperature at which the annealing of the wire whose sectional shape has been formed in the cross section forming step and the baking of the insulation coating applied to wire in the coating step are performable.
Pertinent to claim 3, Harada discloses applying a thermosetting resin (see polyimide and polyamideimide in [0014], the same resins as recited in [0035] of the present application) to the coil portion as the insulation coating, and the common heat treatment step is a step of performing the heat treatment at an annealing temperature of the coil portion that is higher than a curing temperature at whichthe thermosetting resin serving as the insulation coating applied to the coil portion in the coating step is cured by the baking.
Pertinent to claim 7, Harada discloses the common heat treatment step is a step of performing the heat treatment by using the same heating apparatus (105) to perform the annealing of the wire whose sectional shape has been formed in the cross section forming step and the baking of the insulation coating applied to the wire in the coating step.
Pertinent to claim 8, Harada discloses the common heat treatment step is a step of performing the heat treatment at the same heating temperature (in furnace 105) to perform the annealing of the wire whose sectional shape has been formed in the cross section forming step and the baking of the insulation coating applied to the wire in the coating step.
One of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention would have found it obvious to utilize the process taught by Hurada to form a magnet wire having a rectangular cross section, for use as the magnet wire with rectangular cross section of Sung, as a choice among conventional magnet wire manufacturing processes, with predictable results.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claim 5 is objected to as being dependent upon a rejected base claim, but would be allowable if rewritten in independent form including all of the limitations of the base claim and any intervening claims.
Conclusion
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/LIVIUS R. CAZAN/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 3729