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 .
ART REJECTION:
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
In the event the determination of the status of the application as subject to AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103 (or as subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103) is incorrect, any correction of the statutory basis (i.e., changing from AIA to pre-AIA ) for the rejection will not be considered a new ground of rejection if the prior art relied upon, and the rationale supporting the rejection, would be the same under either status.
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.
The factual inquiries for establishing a background for determining obviousness under 35 U.S.C. 103 are summarized as follows:
1. Determining the scope and contents of the prior art.
2. Ascertaining the differences between the prior art and the claims at issue.
3. Resolving the level of ordinary skill in the pertinent art.
4. Considering objective evidence present in the application indicating obviousness or nonobviousness.
This application currently names joint inventors. In considering patentability of the claims the examiner presumes that the subject matter of the various claims was commonly owned as of the effective filing date of the claimed invention(s) absent any evidence to the contrary. Applicant is advised of the obligation under 37 CFR 1.56 to point out the inventor and effective filing dates of each claim that was not commonly owned as of the effective filing date of the later invention in order for the examiner to consider the applicability of 35 U.S.C. 102(b)(2)(C) for any potential 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(2) prior art against the later invention.
Claim(s) 1 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Saarinen(USPGPUB 2022/0050017 A1) in view of Huang et al(CN 113176092 A).
-- In considering claim 1, the claimed subject matter that is met by Saarinen includes:
1) receiving, by a bearing defect diagnosis apparatus, a motor three phase current signal is met by the bearing fault detector for detecting a bearing fault of a rolling element bearing mounted around a shaft(see: sec[0050]), wherein processing circuitry(5) is used to determining bearing fault, based on estimated amplitudes compared to random noise(See: sec[0076]).
- Saarinen does not teach:
1) performing, by the bearing defect diagnosis apparatus, denoising on the motor three-phase current signal
2) transforming, by the bearing defect diagnosis apparatus, the denoised motor three-phase current signal into a single-phase current signal
3) determining, by the bearing defect diagnosis apparatus, a feature based on the single-phase current signal
4) determining, by the bearing defect diagnosis apparatus, whether the bearing is defective based on the feature.
Although the above stated subject matter is not specifically taught by Saarinen, Saarinen does desire to utilize bearing defect diagnosis apparatus to diagnose faults in a bearing by measuring frequencies in signals emanating from the bearing(see: Saarinen, sec[0012]). Use of systems which diagnose noise from three phase current signals is well known. In related art, Huang et al(Huang) teaches a bearing fault diagnosis method Wherein neural network takes samples of a current signal of a motor bearing, and determines a defect feature based on the diagnosis of the current signals(see: Huang, sec[0015;0017]). The system is denoised by the using improved EWT to decompose, reconstructing the signal, reducing the influence of noise in the envelop spectrum, such that the envelope spectrum difference between each fault is larger, while at the same time, simplifying the pattern complexity so as to effectively improve the diagnosis accuracy of the neural network module(see: Huang, sec[0026]).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filing date of the claimed subject matter, to incorporate the program that determines bearing faults, as taught by Huang, into the circuitry of Saarinen, since this would have provided a more effective system for determining bearing faults.
-- Claim 4 recites essentially the same subject matter as that of claim 1, and therefore is met for the reasons as met as discussed in the rejection of claim 1 above.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 2-3, and 5-6 are 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
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to DARYL C POPE whose telephone number is (571)272-2959. The examiner can normally be reached 9AM - 5PM M-F.
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/DARYL C POPE/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2686