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24 December 2020PatentsRory O'Neill

Fed Circ cancels Raytheon patent win in now-sealed opinion

The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has cancelled a win for  Raytheon over  General Electric in a now sealed opinion, originally published yesterday, December 23.

GE filed at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) for the cancellation of a Raytheon patent covering a turbofan jet engine.

The PTAB ruled the patent was valid and not obvious, but the Federal Circuit has now struck down that decision and remanded the case to the board for further proceedings.

According to the court, the PTAB lacked substantial evidence for its findings on the nonobviousness of the Raytheon patent (US number 8,695,920).

GE had cited prior art, referred to in the judgment as Wendus, which the US conglomerate claimed anticipated key claims of the patent.

Raytheon’s patent covers a high pressure two-stage engine, where several components operate at a lower speed, as opposed to a conventional “direct-drive” engine.

The two-stage design boasts several benefits over the traditional engine, including greater efficiency, and reduced mechanical stress on the fan.

The opinion was sealed shortly after it was published yesterday. Bloomberg reports that this was due to the fact that it included details of GE’s negotiations with Airbus, in the section dealing with GE’s standing to bring an appeal.

According to the original opinion: “GE has offered this preferred geared turbofan design to Airbus in response to a request for information Airbus dispatched for its next-generation narrow body aircraft.”

The PTAB found that Wendus “teaches away” from using a two-stage high pressure turbine rather than, as GE argued, “merely suggesting” a general preference for a one-stage high-pressure turbine.

According to the Federal Circuit, a single-stage design was not “critical” to the technology outlined in Wendus.

“Wendus itself only weakly supports that a one-stage high-pressure turbine has weight and cost advantages over a two-stage high pressure turbine.

At several points in Wendus, the authors describe particular advantages of their advanced engine concept. In none of these sections does Wendus set forth a single-stage high pressure turbine or the reduced weight and cost of the single-stage design as an advantage of its planned advanced engine,” the Federal Circuit’s opinion read.

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