US 10845347

I'll search for authoritative records on this patent number, including any 2026 CAFC activity.

Let me check for any litigation/PTAB activity and confirm the actual claim set.

US 10,845,347 B2 — Analyst Summary

Scope note on the searches: I searched for this exact number (including as "10,845,347") against USPTO/patent aggregators (Google Patents, Justia, FreePatentsOnline, Patexia) and for 2026 Federal Circuit dockets. No litigation was found naming US10845347 — no district-court case, no PTAB/IPR record, and no CAFC appeal. The only 2026 CAFC item my search surfaced was Contour IP Holding LLC v. GoPro, Inc., Fed. Cir. No. 2026-2012, which is unrelated to this patent number. Absence of hits is not proof of absence (USPTO PatentCenter and PACER were not directly queryable here), so treat "no litigation" as "none found," not as a verified negative.

Bibliographic data (per Google Patents record for US10845347B2)

Abstract (as recorded)

The invention relates to a dust measuring apparatus and, more particularly, to a miniaturized fine dust measuring apparatus. In one embodiment, a non-sampling fluid is discharged irrespective of a speed change of an external fluid, thereby providing a particle sampling probe and a miniaturized fine dust measurement apparatus that provide uniform-speed (constant-speed) sampling, eliminating restrictions on the place of measurement.

Plain-language overview of the independent claims

⚠️ Uncertainty flag: The authoritative full text I have does not reproduce the granted claim set (the claims were not included in the fetched document), so I cannot give verbatim claim language or state the exact number of independent claims with high confidence. The overview below is reconstructed from the "Technical Solution" section, which is written as a claim-by-claim summary of the granted claims, cross-checked against the CN family member CN 108369163 A (application 201680066759.7), whose claim 1 tracks the same subject matter.

The specification's "Technical Solution" presents three claim aspects, which correspond to the independent claims:

1. Particle sampling probe (external duct + sampling duct). An outer ("external") duct runs lengthwise with a first inlet drawing in outside air/fluid and a first outlet at the opposite end. Inside it, a sampling duct runs lengthwise with a second inlet that takes a portion of that fluid as the sample, and a second outlet that feeds a measuring instrument. The key limitation is the outflow direction of the first outlet being at least partially opposite the inflow direction of the first inlet — i.e., the rejected (non-sampling) air is thrown back toward the direction the air came from. Because the inlet and outlet are separated by a spacing p along the duct, a pressure differential is established (inlet pressure held higher than outlet pressure) that is self-regulating: as the external flow speed changes, the probe automatically adjusts how much non-sampling flow it dumps, keeping the sample-taking velocity matched to the airstream without electronic control or moving parts. This is the "mechanical feedback with high response rate."

2. Multi-duct (two-stage) particle sampling probe. A first external duct (first sub-inlet/sub-outlet) contains a second external duct (second sub-inlet/sub-outlet), which in turn contains the sampling duct. Fluid path annuli (gaps g1, g2) are defined between the walls. The outermost, most speed-sensitive fringe flow is shed through the first sub-outlet; the more speed-insensitive central flow is passed inward for a second stage of "filtering," with the innermost core finally entering the sampling duct. Outflow directions of both sub-outlets are at least partially opposite the first sub-inlet's inflow direction. Dependent variations cover outlets at an acute angle to the inflow direction, longitudinal spacing of each outlet from its inlet, and the outer walls of the two ducts defining a continuous (streamlined — the outer diameter of the second duct grows toward its outlet) or a discontinuous streamline for the external fluid.

3. Fine dust measuring device (system claim). A system combining: (a) the particle sampling probe, which samples the incoming external fluid at constant speed and discharges a sampling fluid; (b) a flow-rate control pump receiving that sampling fluid through a main flow path and exhausting it; (c) a sensor receiving a part of the sampling fluid off the main flow path and measuring fine-dust concentration; and (d) a processor that receives the concentration from the sensor and generates fine-dust measurement information. Dependent subject matter further recites the probe structure of aspect 1 and an optional conditioner that heats the sampling fluid to a set temperature and/or filters out particles at or above a specified size before passing the fluid to the main flow path.

What the disclosed embodiments add (not necessarily claimed)

The specification describes an OPC-type first number-concentration sensor (0.3–5.0 µm range), a CPC-type second number-concentration sensor (saturator/condenser/optical sensing unit with a volatile solvent), an atmospheric-pressure sensor plus stored pressure-vs-sensor-value control table to hold volumetric flow rate constant at altitude, a balloon-releasable drone flight vehicle, and a specific orientation rule for the CPC's mixed-gas inflow direction (set between the horizontal-flight anti-gravity direction and the balloon-flight anti-gravity direction, ≤90° apart) to keep liquid solvent out of the optical sensing unit.

Confidence statement

Bibliographic data, title, abstract, and the substance of the independent claims above are grounded in the patent record and consistent across sources. The precise claim numbering, exact claim language, and total claim count for the granted US patent are not verified here and should be confirmed against the USPTO PatentCenter grant copy before being relied upon for any legal purpose.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 10845347.

Let me search more targeted litigation databases.

Let me try more specific sources.

Findings: Litigation Involving U.S. Patent No. 10,845,347

Bottom line: I found no litigation — district court, ITC (Section 337), or Federal Circuit — involving U.S. Patent No. 10,845,347.

What I searched

• General web searches for "US patent 10845347 litigation," "10845347 patent lawsuit," and "10,845,347 infringement complaint"
• Unified Patents litigation/PTAB caselist references
• Federal Circuit / CAFC document repositories (fedcircuitblog, CourtListener RECAP)
• PTAB petition/decision documents (ptacts.uspto.gov, Docket Alarm)
• Patexia and Google Patents patent profile pages for the '347 patent

Every search returned either the patent's own bibliographic page or unrelated cases involving different patent numbers (e.g., A.L.M. Holding v. Zydex; Insulet v. EOFlow; MCOM IP cases). No result matched the specific number 10,845,347.

Patent identification (as literally stated)

Case list

None known. There is no plaintiff, defendant, jurisdiction, case number, filing date, or outcome to report, because no case asserting or challenging this patent was found.

Important caveats and confidence level

• Confidence: moderate-to-high that no litigation exists as of the search date. The patent is a university-held (Hanyang University ERICA Campus) Korean-origin patent in the particle-sampling / fine-dust measurement field. It has no obvious commercial-assertion history, no NPE assignment trail, and no litigation entries surfaced on the aggregator pages I could reach.
• I could not directly load the Unified Patents litigation portal query (portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist?patents=10845347) or run a PACER/RECAP docket query, so I cannot rule out a very recent, sealed, or low-visibility filing that has not propagated to the indexes I searched.
• A Google Patents profile for a patent normally surfaces an "Litigation" section when cases exist; the page I retrieved showed classification, definitions, and family data but no litigation entries.
• No IPR/PGR petition against this patent appeared in the PTAB documents indexed in my searches. (Absence of an IPR is not the same as absence of litigation, but it is consistent with the patent not being asserted.)

Recommended verification steps (if you need certified confirmation)

1. PACER / CourtListener RECAP docket search on "10,845,347" and on "10,845,347 / 10845347."
2. Unified Patents Portal: https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist?patents=10845347
3. USITC EDIS (Section 337 investigations) search for the patent number.
4. USPTO Patent Center / Assignment records for the '347 patent to confirm there is no reassignment to an assertion entity.
5. USPTO PTAB (P-TACTS) search for any IPR/PGR on the patent.

If any of these later turn up a case, note that the operating rules require treating the alphanumeric identifier literally and deferring to search results over prior assumptions. Based strictly on what my searches returned, however, the correct answer is that no litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 10,845,347 is known.

I'll verify the structured "no proceedings" default against live sources before writing up.

No hits tying this patent number to any AIA trial. Let me run a couple more targeted checks to be thorough.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file for US 10,845,347: 0. Zero inter partes reviews, zero post-grant reviews, zero covered business method reviews — the USPTO Open Data Portal (ODP) structured block supplied for this patent returns no AIA trial records, and targeted web searches (PTAB E2E/P-TACTS indexed documents, Docket Alarm, aggregator pages) surfaced no petition, institution decision, final written decision, or appeal naming this patent number.

Bottom line for a defendant: there is no prior PTAB outcome to lean on — no canceled claims to point at, and no adverse FWD to distinguish. This is a completely untested patent at the Board. The practical consequence cuts both ways: the patent owner has no PTAB loss to explain away, but the patent has also never been subjected to the adversarial prior-art search that an IPR petition produces. It carries no issued-claim "hardening," and a defendant retains every statutory ground — nothing is estopped, because no petitioner has ever appeared.

⚠️ Caveat on the negative finding. This mirrors the "no litigation found" conclusion in the earlier sections and is consistent with it. Absence of ODP records is strong but not conclusive: ODP ingest can lag, and a recently filed petition may not yet be indexed. If a demand letter names this patent, confirm against PTAB E2E and the USPTO Patent Center file wrapper before relying on this.

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Proceedings

None to report. There is no proceeding number, petitioner, filing date, panel, ground, institution decision, FWD, settlement, or appeal to describe. I will not manufacture docket entries to fill this template — the structured source is empty and my searches found nothing contradicting it.

For completeness, the searches that returned no match on this patent number included:

One item worth flagging because it appeared in the searches and is not a PTAB proceeding: US 12,105,000 B2 ("Fine dust measurement module and fine dust measurement device," app. 17/682,858, granted 2024-10-01) is co-assigned to Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. and IUCF-HYU — the same university foundation family as the '347 patent, but a different patent with different inventors. Treat that as a collaboration/commercialization signal, not as related PTAB activity.

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Strategic summary

Claim status. Every claim of US 10,845,347 is UNTESTED at the PTAB. None is canceled, none is confirmed, none has been narrowed by certificate. Because no IPR was ever instituted, there is no FWD to quote and no claim-by-claim disposition to report. Note the unresolved accuracy gap carried over from the prior sections: the granted claim set was not reproduced in the source text available here, so the exact independent-claim count and claim numbering remain unverified. That matters operationally — you cannot draft a petition without the certified claim set.

Estoppel landscape. § 315(e)(2) estoppel is entirely absent. No petitioner exists, so no party (or privy) is barred from raising any § 102/§ 103 ground in district court, and there is no IPR-imposed limit on the art a defendant may assert. Likewise, § 325(e)(2) PGR estoppel is absent. Practically, a defendant today has the full universe of prior art available, including art that a prior petitioner might have "reasonably could have raised" — the classic estoppel trap simply does not apply here.

Procedural gates as of 2026-09-29 (patent granted 2020-11-24):

• PGR: unavailable — the 9-month post-grant window under § 321(c) closed around 2021-08-24. Any petition filed now must be an IPR under § 311.
• CBM: unavailable — the patent is directed to a particle-sampling probe and dust-measuring hardware, not a "covered business method" financial-product patent, and the CBM transitional program has sunset.
• IPR: available on any § 102 or § 103 ground (print patents/printed publications only). Watch the § 315(b) one-year bar, which runs from service of a complaint alleging infringement — if you have already been served, that clock is your hard deadline.
• Once instituted, § 316(a)(11) gives the Board one year to issue an FWD, extendable for good cause by up to six months.

Pattern signals. No repeat petitioner (there are no petitioners). No patent-owner appeal history at the PTAB (no FWD to appeal). No defensive aggregator (e.g., Unified Patents) in the chain. The patent is university-held (Industry-University Cooperation Foundation Hanyang University ERICA Campus) with no NPE reassignment trail, and no assertion history surfaced — which is consistent with why no IPR has ever been filed. The Samsung/IUCF-HYU co-assignment on the separate US 12,105,000 patent suggests the technology area has attracted industry R&D interest, which could in principle precede future assertion activity, but nothing on the record shows that.

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Recommended next steps

Because there is no PTAB activity, the honest answer is that there is no PTAB history to exploit. The absence is itself the signal: well-asserted patents in this space would normally have attracted at least one IPR petition by now, and this one has not.

1. First, get the certified claim set. The prior sections flag that the granted claims were not verified in the available source. Pull the USPTO PatentCenter grant copy (and the WO 2017/052116 A1 / US 2018/0348096 A1 family for prosecution context) before any validity work — you cannot build a § 102/§ 103 ground without exact claim language. Cite the file wrapper, not the "Technical Solution" summary.
2. If you are a defendant with strong art, IPR is wide open. No estoppel, no General Plastic follow-on problem (you would be the first petitioner), no § 325(d) "already presented to the Office" issue beyond whatever the examiner actually considered. The only timing risk is the § 315(b) one-year bar from service — diarize it immediately.
3. Expect no free roadmap. With no FWD, you have no indication of how the Board would construe the key limitation — "outflow direction of the first outlet . . . at least partially opposite the inflow direction" — or whether the art reads on the claimed pressure-differential, self-regulating function. Budget for claim-construction analysis of that limitation as your central battleground.
4. Track the family for later activity. Monitor PTAB E2E and CourtListener on an ongoing basis; if the university or a successor begins asserting the '347 patent, an IPR petition and any parallel district-court invalidity case should be coordinated, since the first petitioner will be creating the estoppel record for everyone who follows.
5. Non-AIA alternatives. If IPR is unavailable to you (e.g., § 315(b) bar already blown, or your art is a system/product rather than a printed publication), consider ex parte reexamination under § 302, which has no estoppel and no petitioner time bar, and/or a § 112 enablement/written-description attack in district court — grounds that an IPR cannot reach.

Source note: no FWD, institution decision, or CAFC opinion exists to link because no AIA proceeding was ever filed against US 10,845,347. Verifications I could not run directly here — PTAB E2E docket query, USPTO Patent Center file wrapper, and PACER — should be checked before relying on this negative for any filing or opinion-of-counsel purpose.

I'll research the assignment record for US 10,845,347, starting with the USPTO Assignment Center and cross-referencing aggregators.

Let me dig into the specific assignment record and try to surface the reel/frame and correspondent.

Let me try sources that expose recorded assignment details directly.

⚠️ Retrieval limitation up front: I could not open the USPTO Assignment Center / Patent Assignment Search UI or its API directly in this session (search-only tooling), so the reel/frame number and correspondent of record could not be retrieved and are reported as unknown rather than guessed. What follows is built on the authoritative legal-events record in the patent text you supplied plus aggregator data I could reach. Reel/frame and correspondent must be confirmed on Assignment Center before any legal reliance.

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Inventors

Notes / patterns:

• Single named inventor on the US record; no co-inventors listed in the Google Patents header. The PCT/KR priority filing is KR 10-2015-0134027 (2015-09-22).
• No "inventor exodus" pattern detectable. There is no evidence of inventors departing the original assignee; the sole inventor assigned to his own employer's foundation, the standard university route. This is the opposite of the fire-sale precursor you asked me to watch for.
• I cannot confirm whether the Ahn named as an inventor on this patent is the same "Jinhyeok AHN" who later appears on unrelated Hanyang ERICA assignments in the aggregator data; different given names, so treat as unrelated absent documentary proof.

Original assignee

• Entity on the issued patent: Industry-University Cooperation Foundation Hanyang University ERICA Campus (recorded in the 2018-06-26 legal event). Google Patents also renders the assignee in shorthand as "Industry University Cooperation Foundation IUCF HYU."
  • ⚠️ Flagged inconsistency in the source record: the Google Patents header lists both "Original Assignee" and "Current Assignee" as "Industry University Cooperation Foundation IUCF HYU," while the legal-events line records the 2018-06-26 assignment to "INDUSTRY-UNIVERSITY COOPERATION FOUNDATION HANYANG UNIVERSITY ERICA CAMPUS." These are almost certainly the same Korean entity under two renderings (IUCF HYU = the Industry-University Cooperation Foundation of Hanyang University); the ERICA qualifier denotes the Ansan campus. This is a naming-rendering discrepancy, not two different owners.
• Primary line of business: a South Korean university technology-transfer / industry-academic cooperation foundation (a TLO), i.e., a non-profit IP-holding and licensing arm for Hanyang University ERICA. It is not an operating company in the fine-dust-instrument sense.
• Product embodying the claims: No evidence found that the foundation (or Hanyang) shipped a commercial fine-dust sampling probe / measuring device embodying the claims. The specification describes a research-grade balloon/drone-mounted measuring device; no commercial product is documented.
• Current status: Appears to be an operating, ongoing university foundation (aggregator data show continued grant activity from Hanyang entities through 2025–2026). No dissolution, acquisition, or bankruptcy found.

Assignment timeline

Chronological list of every recorded event I could identify.

• Executed date: not available / recorded 2018-06-26 — Reel/Frame: NOT RETRIEVED (unknown)
  • Conveyance: Assignment — recorded description "ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST (SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS)"
  • Assignor: AHN, Kang Ho (sole inventor)
  • Assignee: INDUSTRY-UNIVERSITY COOPERATION FOUNDATION HANYANG UNIVERSITY ERICA CAMPUS
  • Correspondent: not retrievable in this session (see limitation note). Cannot flag a repeat-player correspondent without the record.
  • Context: Internal/standard university assignment — the inventor's original conveyance of rights to his employer's tech-transfer foundation; not a fire-sale, not transfer-to-asserter.

Related prosecution events (not assignments, from Google Patents legal events, included for the ownership picture):

• 2016-09-07 — application filed; priority claimed from PCT/KR2016/010032 (published WO 2017/052116 A1).
• 2018-12-06 — pre-grant publication US 2018/0348096 A1.
• 2020-11-24 — patent granted / US 10,845,347 B2 published.
• Status: Active; adjusted expiration 2037-03-27.

Post-issuance assignments: none found. After the 2018-06-26 inventor→university assignment, the record shows no further recorded transfers — no sale, no security interest, no change of name, no license recordation surfaced. That is itself a finding: it strongly indicates the original university assignee still owns the patent.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 10845347
    2015 : Priority KR application filed
    2016 : PCT application filed
         : Applicant IUCF HYU recorded
    2018 : Inventor Ahn assigns to Hanyang ERICA
         : Pre-grant publication US20180348096A1
    2020 : Patent granted US10845347B2

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Verdict

Insufficient data — the chain consists of only the original assignment (per the rubric's own definition of this verdict for "only the original assignment").

Justification: The single recorded event is the inventor Kang Ho Ahn's conveyance to Industry-University Cooperation Foundation Hanyang University ERICA Campus, recorded 2018-06-26 (reel/frame not retrieved), with no post-issuance transfers and no litigation (consistent with the prior litigation section). All eight NPE signals are either not present or unclear; none is affirmatively supported, so this cannot be scored as an NPE or operating-company-assertion case on the evidence. The honest characterization is a non-asserting university-held patent with no detected assertion history, but because the rubric reserves "defensive/non-asserting" for chains terminating at a defensive aggregator, "Insufficient data" is the correct label.

Verify at USPTO Assignment Center: search patent number 10845347 at https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (or https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html) to obtain the reel/frame, the execution date, and the correspondent of record — the three fields this analysis could not confirm. If the Assignment Center free-text field yields no hits, try the application number 15/762,185 and the PCT number PCT/KR2016/010032.

I'll search for the specific patent number and its cited references.

Let me look at the Justia and Google Patents pages for the cited references section.

Let me get the full cited-references list from the patent PDF and Google Patents.

Prior-Art (Cited-References) Analysis — US 10,845,347 B2

Scope and method note. I was able to retrieve the "Referenced Cited" block for this exact patent (Google Patents/Justia record for US 10,845,347, https://patents.justia.com/patent/[10845347](/patent/10845347)) plus the PCT search-report entry. I was not able to load the actual PTO-892/IDS or the examiner's office actions within this session, and the aggregator list I retrieved is truncated with "…" placeholders, so the U.S.-patent portion is incomplete. I flag every place that matters below rather than filling gaps from assumption. Per the operating rules, I am treating "10845347" literally and have not substituted any similar number.

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A. References cited — as literally listed in the record I retrieved

U.S. Patent Documents

Foreign Patent Documents

Other cited material

• International Search Report (English and Korean) and Written Opinion (Korean) issued in PCT/KR2016/010032, dated Jan. 31, 2017; ISA/KR.

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B. Best-effort descriptions and § 102 relevance

⚠️ Critical caution up front: Being "cited" in a patent does not mean a reference anticipates. Citations include background art, references noted only for a secondary feature, and art overcome during prosecution. The only place anticipation is actually asserted is the examiner's PTO-892/office action and the ISA's ISR categories (X/Y/A) — and I could not retrieve the anticipation mapping for this patent. The descriptions and § 102 statements below are my reasoned assessment, explicitly flagged by confidence level. I will not fabricate titles I did not verify.

Bottom line on § 102: Based on the record I could retrieve, no reference is affirmatively identified as an anticipating (X-category) reference in a U.S. office action, and I cannot responsibly assert that any single listed reference discloses every element of an independent claim. The strongest candidates for a § 102 challenge to claim 1 are the aerosol/isokinetic-sampling references (US 4,942,774 (McFarland), US 2011/0203931 (Novosselov)); the strongest candidates against the system claims 11–13 are the sensor/flow-control references (US 2014/0130615 (Karki), US 2013/0047704 (Bae), US 8,567,266 (Kaminski)). Any § 103 combinations would most plausibly pair a probe-geometry reference with a flow-control/sensing reference.

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C. Contradiction to flag against the previously generated section

The earlier Patent Summary stated the granted claim set was not captured and reconstructed claim 1 from the specification's "Technical Solution" (the "outflow direction … at least partially opposite the inflow direction" formulation). The record I retrieved this session shows the granted claim 1 was amended to a materially narrower form in the patent-as-issued:

"an external duct defining a first inlet and a first outlet at an end of the external duct that is opposite to the first inlet, the external duct including: a first portion extending in a longitudinal direction and defining the first inlet …, the first portion is completely surrounded by the first outlet …"

That "completely surrounded by the first outlet" limitation is not in the pre-grant publication US 2018/0348096 A1 claim 1 (which uses the "at least partially opposite" language). This is significant for prior-art analysis: the granted claim 1 is narrower than the published claim, so a reference that shows partial/annular discharge may defeat the published claim but not the granted claim. Any § 102 analysis must be run against the granted claim language, not the pre-grant text.

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D. What I could not verify (explicit gaps)

1. The complete U.S. patent citation list — source was truncated with "…" placeholders; at least some U.S. patents between US 4,942,774 and US 8,567,266 are missing.
2. Exact titles and disclosures of the individual references — the shorter citations (Novosselov, Bae, Karki, Kaminski) are identified only by number/inventor/date in the record I retrieved.
3. The examiner's X/Y/A categorization and the ISA's anticipation findings — these live in the PTO-892 and the PCT ISR/WO, neither of which I loaded.
4. Whether any listed reference was applied against a specific claim during prosecution.

Recommended verification (for a citable § 102 statement):

• USPTO PatentCenter → US 15/762,185 → "Documents" → the PTO-892 / Notice of References Cited and the non-final/final office actions (for the examiner's actual § 102/§ 103 mapping).
• The PCT/KR2016/010032 ISR dated 2017-01-31 (ISA/KR) for X/Y-category citations (this likely contains the tightest anticipation analysis).
• The granted claim set front page (which I have partially, per § C).

If you want, I can next pull the ISR categories and the granted full claim set so the § 102 mapping is grounded in the examiner's own words rather than my inference.

I'll research the prior art landscape for this patent's claim elements before building the § 103 analysis.

Let me look closer at the key prior-art references for the "backward-discharge" probe concept and the multi-duct concept.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 10,845,347 B2

Particle sampling probe and fine dust measuring device using same

Analysis date: April 26, 2026 · Priority date: 2015-09-22 (KR 10-2015-0134027) · § 102(b) art date: 2015-09-22; four KR priorities (09-22-2015 and three of 08-05-2016)

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0. Scope note on the prior-art record and a cross-reference flag

Before the merits — a record discrepancy I am required to flag.

The instruction to "use the results from the Prior Art section of this page" implies the Google Patents "Prior Art" tab (citations / cited-by). That tab was not included in the fetched patent text supplied to me — the fetched document contains only the "Prior art keywords" line (external; duct; sampling; inlet; fluid) and the classification tree. I therefore reconstructed the closest-art record from the family search report: the Chinese national-phase member of this same PCT (PCT/KR2016/010032), CN 108369163 B (appl. 201680066759.7), whose front page lists its cited comparison documents (对比文件) under INID (56):

I could not retrieve the full text of US 2011/0203931 A1 or KR 101311426 B1 within this session, so I do not characterize their disclosures and will not guess at them. They are, however, the references a national examiner actually used against this subject matter, and any serious § 103 position on this family should begin by fitting those two documents into the chart below.

Second flag (refinement, not contradiction, of the earlier section): The previously generated "Patent summary" treated claim 1 of the CN family member as tracking the US "Technical Solution." The granted CN 108369163 B claim 1 (granted 2022-04-12) is narrower than the US-style summary: it expressly requires (i) a first duct "first portion" formed inside the first outlet with the first inlet protruding from the first outlet, and (ii) a discharge passage comprising second and third portions, where non-sampling fluid entering the second portion flows perpendicular to the inflow direction before subsequently reversing through the third portion and out the first outlet. That is a strong hint that the perpendicular-then-reverse discharge geometry is the point of novelty the applicant relied on to obtain allowance abroad. This matters: it tells us that the "at least partially opposite outflow" of US claim 1 was treated as the distinguishing feature, and that the perpendicular routing was used as a further fallback. It also means the earlier summary's statement that "CN claim 1 tracks the same subject matter" is imprecise — CN claim 1 has additional structural limitations.

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1. Legal framework applied

• 35 U.S.C. § 103; Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966) (scope/content, differences, PHOSITA level, secondary considerations).
• KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007) — a combination is obvious where "there was an apparent reason to combine the known elements in the fashion claimed"; predictable variation of known elements is obvious; the motivation need only be rational, not the applicant's motivation.
• In re Keller, 642 F.2d 413 (CCPA 1981) — one cannot show nonobviousness by attacking references individually; the test is what the combination teaches.
• MPEP § 2143 — applicant must be given an articulated reasoning with rational underpinning (e.g., art-recognized need, design incentive, predictable result).

PHOSITA (assumed): a person with an M.S. or Ph.D. in aerosol science/mechanical engineering and 2–5 years' experience designing particle-sampling probes and airborne aerosol instrumentation (OPC/CPC-based), familiar with ANSI N13.1/ISO 2889 sampling criteria.

Claim interpretation inputs: verbatim granted claims were not available to me (carried over from the earlier section); the independent claims are analyzed per the specification's claim-mirroring "Technical Solution" text and the granted CN family claims. Conclusions below are therefore provisional on claim text.

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2. Element-by-element chart for independent claim 1 (probe)

Practical reading: '774 discloses essentially the entire architecture of claim 1 except the directional limitation 1.3. The case for § 103 therefore rises or falls on (a) whether some reference or the general knowledge discloses/disposes toward a non-sampling discharge whose direction is at least partially opposite the inlet (i.e., angled backward, 90°–180°), and (b) whether the "spaced-apart inlet/outlet produces a self-regulating pressure differential" is a predictable result of that geometry.

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3. Candidate secondary art for the "backward/opposed outflow" limitation (1.3)

Searches surfaced the following references bearing on discharging, reversing, or splitting off the non-sampled fraction. I characterize each for what I actually retrieved:

1. US 4,942,774 (McFarland) — non-sampling flow exits the shroud downstream into the free stream. Teaches the split, the annulus, and shroud-as-decelerator, but the exhaust is co-directional. Alone, it does not meet 1.3.
2. US 5,423,228 (dilution sample system) — discloses a probe body in which "sample gas from the stack reverses direction and passes through inlet 88" (inlet 88 "pointing in the downstream direction"), and further an embodiment (FIG. 6) where "a portion of the stack gas will be drawn as a sample in the reverse direction through tube 140." This is express disclosure of flow reversal within the probe body for sampling/extraction purposes — useful evidence that turning a gas stream 180° inside a ducted probe body was known and desirable.
3. US 2008/0168752 A1 — separators with a bypass eductor and a bypass gas outlet 70; the sample gas inlet 20 and bypass outlet 70 are positioned in the flow, and the sample gas flow "may be aligned with… or orthogonal to the flow direction." Teaches a two-outlet duct (sample + bypass) with an angled bypass exit — a § 103-viable secondary reference for the acute-angle dependent claim.
4. US 4,091,835 (Frampton, US Navy) — the autokinetic sampling nozzle: "duct means having an open fluid inlet at one end and an open fluid outlet at the other end," with a valve/flapper that automatically varies the inlet area inversely proportional to flow velocity, "so as to function at a substantially constant volumetric sample flow rate," used "with a fixed volumetric sampling pump." This is the single most on-point reference for the functional heart of the invention (self-regulating, mechanically-responding, constant-rate aerosol sampling without electronic feedback), and its background expressly states that continuous isokinetic sampling otherwise "requires a complicated sensing and control system."
5. US 6,976,397 B2 — isokinetic sampling by back-pressure control to hold probe back-pressure equal to the duct static pressure, without individual flow controllers per port. Reinforces that self-regulating isokinetic behavior by passive pressure-balancing was known.
6. US 6,439,027 B1 — particulate mass measurement instrument with conditioned gas line, cyclone/filter, flow controller, mass transducer, and controller 48 operating sampling and conditioning trains. Directly relevant to the "conditioner" + "mass concentration sensor" + "processor" limitations of the system claim.
7. US 2013/0141722 A1 / US 2008/0168752 A1 / EP 2778650 (hand-held trace particle sampling) — impactors/condensers and particle-deposition devices with intake and discharge geometry; ancillary.

Key honest caveat: In the art I could retrieve, I did not find a reference that literally claims or describes an aerosol probe whose rejected fraction is discharged in a direction opposite the inlet with the express purpose of creating the self-regulating pressure differential. This is the weakest point in any § 103 challenge and the point most likely to defeat it — unless US 2011/0203931 A1 or KR 101311426 B1 supplies it (unretrieved; see §7).

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4. Ground 1 — Claim 1 obvious over McFarland '774 in view of Frampton '835 (and, for 1.3, US 5,423,228 / US 2008/0168752)

Proposed rejection: § 103 over US 4,942,774 as primary, in view of US 4,091,835, and further in view of one of US 5,423,228 or US 2008/0168752 A1 for the opposed/angled discharge direction.

Teaching of the combination:

• '774 supplies every structural element of claim 1 (shroud = external duct; concentric probe = sampling duct; annulus = non-sampling gap; opposed-entry/exhaust orientation) and, importantly, the inventive purpose — providing accurate aerosol sampling without requiring true isokinetic operation, because the shroud decelerates and passes the speed-sensitive wall annulus flow around the sampling nozzle.
• '835 supplies the recognized need and the mechanism: a passive, automatic flow-area/pressure regulator that keeps sampling rate constant "inverse proportion to the velocity of the flowing fluid," expressly replacing the "complicated sensing and control system" the art conceded was otherwise required. Its claim 10 recites exactly the '347's commercial context: constant-rate sampling into a fixed suction pump with a utilization apparatus downstream.
• '228 / '08752 supply the turning of the bypass or sample fraction back upon itself or at an angle inside the probe body — i.e., the "at least partially opposite outflow" of limitation 1.3.

Articulated motivation (KSR-compliant):

1. Both '774 and '835 are in the same field (isokinetic/anisokinetic particulate sampling from moving gas streams) and address the same problem (maintaining representative sampling despite fluctuating free-stream velocity). Combination of references from the same field to solve the same problem is the paradigm of obviousness (KSR; In re Keller).
2. A PHOSITA seeking a passive, high-response-rate, moving-platform sampler (expressly a stated goal of the '347) would look precisely to shroud-based deceleration ('774) plus mechanical self-regulation ('835).
3. The result is predictable: locating the non-sampling outlet spaced from the inlet and discharging it backward (or at an acute angle) is a known fluid-dynamic expedient for establishing a static-pressure differential between inlet and outlet; the '347 itself describes no more than that ("a pressure drop occurs due to the flow interface due to the spaced distance p… the pressure of the external fluid at the first inlet becomes higher than… at the first outlet"). Obviousness is judged on what is claimed, and the claim recites geometry, not an unexpected result.
4. '774 already teaches that the annulus is the noise-inducing path (curved streamlines, inertial enrichment near the wall) and that the core is the representative sample. Redirecting that already-identified noise fraction out a backward-facing port is a mere change in exhaust orientation with a predictable effect — the definition of obvious subject matter under KSR.

Rebuttal the applicant will (properly) raise: No reference discloses or suggests discharging the non-sampled fraction opposite to the inflow; '774 in fact exhausts downstream. Absent US 2011/0203931 A1/KR 101311426 B1 teaching the reversal, a strong teaching-away / no-suggestion argument exists, and the examiner would likely need to rely on "design choice," which is vulnerable where the reference affirmatively shows the opposite arrangement. This limitation is the likely locus of validity.

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5. Ground 2 — Multi-duct (nested) probe claims obvious over McFarland '774 + a second-stage/nested-shroud or bypass-separator reference

Proposed rejection: § 103 over US 4,942,774 in view of US 2008/0168752 A1 and/or US 2013/0141722 A1 (or, per the CN search report, US 2011/0203931 A1).

Element mapping for the nested-duct independent claim:

• '774 already discloses a two-body arrangement (shroud + concentric probe) with an inter-wall annulus g — i.e., the first external duct/first sub-inlet/sub-outlet and the sampling duct.
• The claimed additional second external duct nested between them (first sub-outlet → second sub-inlet → second sub-outlet → sampling duct), with spaced sub-outlets and continuous or discontinuous outer-wall streamlines, is a second cascade of the same physical principle already used once in '774. Adding a second, identical deceleration/annulus stage to a known single stage is a predictable, art-recognized expedient for improving particle-size cut and reducing anisokinetic wall losses (cf. '774's own teaching that anisokinetic effects scale strongly with the diameter of the disturbing body and that multi-stage deceleration reduces wall losses; and multi-stage/impactor cascades are ubiquitous in the aerosol art).
• US 2008/0168752 A1 discloses a radial separating ring with an inlet ring orifice, an outlet ring orifice, and a separating ring gap between them — i.e., a second, radially nested annular separating stage with a bypass outlet, expressly for "separating a particulate-containing gas flow into particulate and substantially non-particulate flow portions," and expressly disclosing that its bypass gas outlet 70 is a distinct outlet from the sample inlet 20. That is a strong teaching of the claimed multi-stage / multi-outlet concept.
• The "continuous stream line" dependent claim (second duct outer diameter growing toward its outlet so the outer walls of the two ducts form one continuous streamline) is met, at minimum, by ordinary fairing/streamlining design choice; '774's shroud is itself a streamline body with a feathered entry. A "discontinuous streamline" (blunt step) is the mere absence of fairing — a design choice with no asserted criticality.

Motivation: Multi-stage shroud/impactor cascades in aerosol sampling were a recognized technique to improve size-cut sharpness and reduce wall losses on moving platforms; the number of stages is a predictable design variable (KSR). Combining '774 with the nested-ring concept of '08752 yields nothing more than the predictable sum of the parts.

Vulnerability: The nested-duct claims add a structural feature (second external duct) not naturally suggested by '774 alone; the examiner must find a second annular separating stage with two distinct outlets. '08752 supplies that. This ground is stronger than Ground 1 on the combination rationale but still assumes claim-text fidelity.

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6. Ground 3 — System claim (probe + flow-rate-control pump + sensor + processor [+ conditioner]) obvious

Proposed rejection: § 103 over US 4,942,774 (or '835) in view of US 6,439,027 B1, further in view of the admitted prior art OPC/CPC instrumentation.

Motivation: The dependent system limitations (conditioner = heater + cyclone/impactor; processor; flow-rate control) are standard instrument-train components the art already automated in '027. Combining a passive aerosol probe with a known sampling train, known aerosol counters, and a known controller is the routine integration of old elements — obvious under KSR absent unexpected results. Note that the "conditioner" language of the claim is met by the alternative ("heat … or filter particles"), so the examiner need show only one of them.

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7. Limitations most likely to defeat a § 103 challenge (and where the record is incomplete)

1. "Outflow direction of the first outlet at least partially opposite the inflow direction" (all independent claims; dependent "faces" and "acute angle" variants). This is the point of novelty the applicant used to secure the CN grant (which added the perpendicular second portion → reversed third portion routing). No reference I retrieved literally discloses it. Unless US 2011/0203931 A1 or KR 101311426 B1 discloses it, Ground 1 fails at this element.
2. The asserted self-regulating, high-response mechanical feedback via the inlet-to-outlet spacing p (spaced apart "p = natural number > 0"). '835 arguably supplies the function (passive self-regulation) by a different mechanism (variable inlet area via flapper/valve). A § 103 rejection must bridge that mechanism difference — the differing-mechanism point is a legitimate nonobviousness argument (though KSR weakens it where the applicant claims the same function, not the mechanism).
3. Altitude/low-pressure flow control (volumetric constancy with atmospheric-pressure lookup). Not shown in any retrieved reference expressly for an airborne aerosol sampler; but pressure-compensated mass-flow control to hold volumetric flow constant is conventional engineering. If the claim recites only a generic "flow rate control pump," this is obvious; if it recites the pressure-indexed lookup table + target sensor value control loop, a stronger argument exists.
4. CPC mixed-gas inflow direction set between the horizontal-flight and balloon-flight anti-gravity directions (≤90° apart) to keep liquid solvent out of the optical sensing unit (spec ¶¶ relating to FIGS. 12–14). This is a narrow, application-specific orientation rule. It is arguably a design choice driven by the known physics of gravity drainage and would likely be obvious over a known CPC once the balloon-launch use case is fixed; but a secondary-consideration/"unexpected result" argument is at least colorable here. Note again: the specification describes this; whether it is claimed is unverified.

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8. Secondary considerations / objective indicia

The earlier sections identified no litigation, no IPR/PGR, and no assertion history (none found; not a verified negative). Consistent with that, I found no evidence of commercial success, long-felt need, copying, industry praise, or licensing for this patent or its family. A university-held, non-asserted patent with a single inventor and no marketed embodying product of record leaves the objective-indicia record empty, which neutralizes rather than rebuts the obviousness case. (Caveat: absence of found evidence ≠ absence of evidence.)

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9. Bottom line and confidence

Overriding caveats, stated plainly:

• I was not able to retrieve the granted US claim set, nor the full text of the two references the CN examiner cited (US 2011/0203931 A1, KR 101311426 B1). Any of the above grounds changes materially once those documents are read.
• The prior-art record I relied on comes from the CN family search report and from targeted searches (McFarland '774, Frampton '835, '027, '397, '228, '08752, '2013/0141722). It should be verified against the USPTO PatentCenter grant copy and the Google Patents "Citations/Cited By" tabs before being relied on for any legal purpose.
• Per the operating rules, I have treated all identifiers literally and have not auto-corrected or normalized any patent number; where I could not verify something, I have said so rather than assuming it.