DETAILED ACTION
Notice to Applicant
In the amendment dated 2026/01/28, the following has occurred: Claims 1, 8-9, 12, 15, and 19 have been amended; Claim 10 has been canceled; Claim 20 has been added.
Claims 1-9 and 11-20 are pending and are examined herein. This is a Final Rejection.
The text of those sections of Title 35, U.S. Code not included in this action can be found in a prior Office action.
Specification
The disclosure is objected to because of the following informalities: Paragraphs 0017, 0018, 0020, and 0051 (of instant PGPUB US 2023/0387397) refer to a commercially available carbon with the trademarked name Maxsorb III ™. The trademark symbol should appear next to the name wherever it appears.
Appropriate correction is required.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 112
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112(b):
(b) CONCLUSION.—The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor regards as the invention.
Claims 1-9 and 11-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) as being indefinite for failing to particularly point out and distinctly claim the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor regards as the invention.
Sole independent claim 1 now requires a carbon material that “has an average pore volume of 1.5 – 3 cm3g-1 and an average pore diameter of 1 nm to 3 nm,” which Applicant argues distinguishes over the prior art, which supposedly does not teach such a small average pore diameter for carbon materials having such a large average pore volume. The claim language is indefinite both with regard to “average pore volume” and “average pore diameter.” It is unclear whether “average pore volume” refers to total specific pore volume, as calculated in physisorption testing with an unspecified method, or some other measure. It also unclear whether “average pore diameter” is an equivalent diameter derived from a volume-to-area ratio in, e.g. BET testing, or whether it is a weighted average over a pore size distribution, that is either number-weighted, area-weighted, or volume-weighted. The claim has been interpreted broadly to refer to porous carbons with a total pore volume reported in cc/g units and average pore sizes reported as either equivalent pore diameters/size or PSD-derived numbers. The dependent claims are rejected for depending on claim 1.
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.
Claims 1, 4, 6-9, 11, 13-16, 18, and 20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Li2 (Li et al. “Safe and Durable High-Temperature Lithium-Sulfur Batteries via Molecular Layer Deposited Coating.” Nano Letter. 2016, 16, 3545-3549—the Office also cites to the provided Supporting Information of this article), with reference to Aihara (Aihara et al. “The Electrochemical Characteristics and Applicability of an Amorphous Sulfide-Based Solid Ion Conductor for the Next-Generation Solid-State Lithium Secondary Batteries.” Frontiers in Energy Research, March 2016, vol. 4, art. 18).
Regarding Claim 1, Li2 teaches:
a carbon-sulfur composite material of active sulfur and conductive carbon with an MLD-deposited layer of alucone of controllable thickness, on the order of a few nm (abstract, Figs. 1 and 2, p. 3546)
wherein the alcuone layer is not only uniformly present across the surface of the electrode layer, but is also “evenly distributed throughout the electrode vertically, demonstrating the conformal and uniform nature of the MLD process” at the particle level, indicating alucone coating on individual particle surfaces (p. 3546)
used in a cathode opposite a lithium anode (Fig. 3, p. 3548)
Li2 does not explicitly teach:
the specific total pore volume and the pore size distribution or average
Applicant’s own specification indicates that commercially available porous carbon Maxsorb III ™ has the claimed pore volume and pore size (¶ 0017-0018, 0051). It would have been obvious to use a commercially available porous carbon, such as Maxsorb III ™, as the carbon support/scaffolding in a carbon-sulfur composite active material, since it was known in the art to useful for such purposes, and Li2 itself employs a commercially available porous carbon as a generic scaffolding (p. 3546). The Office further points to Aihara, which teaches the use of this commercial carbon as a porous carbon with sulfur to form a composite electrode (p. 2, column2). Simple substitution of one known element for another to obtain predictable results has been found to be obvious. See KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007).
Regarding Claims 4, 6-8, Li2 teaches:
a carbon-sulfur composite material of active sulfur and conductive carbon with an MLD-deposited layer of alucone of controllable thickness, on the order of a few nm (abstract, Figs. 1 and 2, p. 3546)
Regarding Claim 9, Li2 teaches:
70 wt% sulfur (p. 1 of the Supporting Information)
Regarding Claims 11 and 20, Aihara renders obvious:
use of commercially available porous carbon, formed by a thermal KOH activation process, wherein melt infusion of sulfur was likewise conventional in the art (see e.g. previously cited Li3)
It would have been obvious to use conventional sulfur infiltration techniques with commercially available carbon, since Li2 teaches commercial carbon with conventional infiltration techniques. Simple substitution of one known element for another to obtain predictable results has been found to be obvious. See KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007).
Regarding Claims 13 and 14, Li2 teaches:
use in a cell with a lithium anode (abstract, etc.)
Regarding Claim 15, Li2 teaches:
conventional LiFSI salts in liquid electrolyte (p. 5 of Supporting Information)
Regarding Claim 16, Li2 teaches:
carbonate-based electrolyte comprising EC (p. 2 of Supporting Information)
Regarding Claim 18, Li2 teaches:
a method of forming the layer via MLD (abstract)
Claims 2, 3, and 17 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Li2 (Li et al. “Safe and Durable High-Temperature Lithium-Sulfur Batteries via Molecular Layer Deposited Coating.” Nano Letter. 2016, 16, 3545-3549—the Office also cites to the provided Supporting Information of this article) and Aihara, in further view of Locke (US 2022/0102758 to Locke et al.).
Regarding Claims 2-3 and 17, Li2 does not explicitly teach:
a solid electrolyte material such as LiPON, LLZO, LATP, LGPS, LPS, or the like was mixed with the composite particles
Claims 5 and 19 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Li2 (Li et al. “Safe and Durable High-Temperature Lithium-Sulfur Batteries via Molecular Layer Deposited Coating.” Nano Letter. 2016, 16, 3545-3549—the Office also cites to the provided Supporting Information of this article) and Aihara, in further view of Li1 (Li et al. “Nanoscale stabilization of Li-sulfur batteries by atomic layer deposited Al2O3.” RSC Adv., 2014, 4, 27126-27129).
Regarding Claims 5 and 19, Li2 does not teach:
an alumina ceramic layer formed via ALD at low temperature
Li1, however, teaches a simple alumina ceramic layer formed via ALD at 100 °C (abstract) for a composite carbon-sulfur active material. Alumina rather than alucone and ALD rather than MLD would have been substitutable equivalents within the broad range of “thin, conformal ceramic layers for carbon-sulfur composites” being claimed here, absent a showing of unexpected results for one over the other within the context of what was known by one of ordinary skill in the art. Use of a known technique to improve similar devices, methods, or products in the same way, and applying a known technique to a known device, method, or product ready for improvement to yield predictable results has been found to be obvious. See KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007). Simple substitution of one known element for another to obtain predictable results has been found to be obvious. See KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007).
Claim 12 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Li2 (Li et al. “Safe and Durable High-Temperature Lithium-Sulfur Batteries via Molecular Layer Deposited Coating.” Nano Letter. 2016, 16, 3545-3549—the Office also cites to the provided Supporting Information of this article) and Aihara, in further view of Li3 (Li et al. “A high-energy sulfur cathode in carbonate electrolyte by eliminating polysulfides via solid-phase lithium-sulfur transformation.” Nature Communications (2018) 9:4509—the Office also cites to the provided Supporting Information of this article).
Regarding Claim 12, Li2 is silent with respect to:
the conductivity of the coating layer
Li3, however, from the same field of invention, regarding an alucone layer on a composite material, teaches Nyquist left intercepts on the order of 10 ohms, strongly implying specific ionic resistances of the alucone layers being less than 10 Ω·cm2 for an electrode with area of several cm2 (pp. 8-9, Supplementary Fig. 12). In addition, Li2 and Li3 teach substantially the same material as the instant invention (e.g. alucone) at few nm thicknesses deposited via MLD, which would be expected to have an ionic resistance within the claimed value absent a showing that the claimed coating layer was different in some crucial respect
Response to Arguments
The arguments submitted 2026/01/28 have been considered but do not place the application in condition for allowance. Applicant argues that the prior art does not teach the claimed “average pore volume” nor the “average pore diameter.” The claims are now rejected for indefiniteness under § 112. The claims are rejected over Li2 et al. in view of the commercially known Maxsorb III ™ material, that Aihara teaches was already a known porous carbon scaffolding for sulfur.
Applicant further argues that the claims are directed towards an active material “per se” rather than an electrode layer, and that the prior art does not teach ALD/MLD coating of the material particles in contradistinction to an electrode layer (Remarks at pp. no. 6-7). The Office points out, however, that Li2 explicitly teaches that the MLD coating process of the layer leads to a conformal coating on the particles through the layer thickness, not just at the layer surface, indicating that the particles are covered. Secondly, the Office points out that the claim reads on a handful of particles per se, and so a process that leads to a handful of the active material particles being coated with an alucone layer, even if the coating is not homogeneously distributed throughout an electrode layer, would still read on the claims.
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 nonprovisional extension fee (37 CFR 1.17(a)) 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 mailing date of this final action.
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to Michael Dignan, whose telephone number is (571) 272-6425. The examiner can normally be reached from Monday to Friday between 10 AM and 6:30 PM. If any attempt to reach the examiner by telephone is unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Tiffany Legette, can be reached at (571)270-7078. Another resource that is available to applicants is the Patent Application Information Retrieval (PAIR). Information regarding the status of an application can be obtained from the (PAIR) system. Status information for published applications may be obtained from either Private PAIR or Public PAX. Status information for unpublished applications is available through Private PAIR only. For more information about the PAIR system, see http://pair-direct.uspto.gov. Should you have questions on access to the Private PAIR system, please feel free to contact the Electronic Business Center (EBC) at 866-217-9197 (toll-free). Applicants are invited to contact the Office to schedule an in-person interview to discuss and resolve the issues set forth in this Office Action. Although an interview is not required, the Office believes that an interview can be of use to resolve any issues related to a patent application in an efficient and prompt manner.
/MICHAEL L DIGNAN/Examiner, Art Unit 1723