US 11067484

I'll search for this specific patent number and check for any litigation activity.

The second search returned some noise (a Japanese application JP11067484A, which is unrelated). Let me check specifically for litigation and CAFC activity involving this US patent.

US 11,067,484 B2 — Summary

Important caveat up front: I could not directly query the USPTO Patent Center/Patent Public Search API or the CAFC/PACER docket systems from this environment. My checks consisted of web searches for the literal string "11067484" against patent and litigation sources. Those searches returned no litigation, PTAB, or Federal Circuit proceeding involving US 11,067,484. They did return several unrelated "11067484" hits that are not this patent and should not be confused with it:

• JP11067484A / JPS60256674A — a 1984 Japanese application (automatic transmission lock-up), unrelated.
• UK company number 11067484 — Sintela Engineering Limited, unrelated.
• A Czech contract ID, an SEC accession number, etc.

So the litigation/docket portion of your request is unverified / null-result, not a confirmed "no litigation" finding. The bibliographic data below is drawn from the authoritative full text you supplied (Google Patents, fetched 2026-09-24) and corroborated by IDIYAS, Onscope, and FreePatentsOnline listings.

Bibliographic data

Abstract (as issued)

A detector inlet for providing a sample to an analytical apparatus for detecting a substance of interest, the detector inlet comprising a plenum for allowing passage of a flow of a gaseous fluid, the plenum comprising a sampling volume a sampling inlet arranged in the plenum and arranged to collect samples of the gaseous fluid from the sampling volume and to provide the samples to the analytical apparatus, wherein the flow carries particulates and a flow director arranged to create circulatory flow of the gaseous fluid around the plenum encircling the sampling inlet thereby to vary a spatial distribution of the particulates carried by the fluid to increase a relative proportion of the particulates carried past the sampling inlet without entering the sampling volume.

Plain-language overview of the independent claims

Claim 1 — Detector inlet with a circulating (centrifuge) plenum.
A detector inlet feeds sample to an analytical instrument. It has:

• a flow inlet that inhales air carrying the substance of interest into a plenum (an enclosed internal volume plus a sampling volume, also connected to a flow outlet);
• a sampling inlet, specifically a pinhole, located in the plenum, that pulls sample from the sampling volume into the analyzer (the inhaled flow carries particulates); and
• a flow director that sets up a circulatory flow that loops around the enclosed plenum volume and encircles the sampling inlet.

The point: the swirling/centrifuging motion pushes particulates outward toward the walls, so a larger share of the particles is swept past the pinhole to the outlet instead of being drawn into the sampling volume — vapor still diffuses in, but the pinhole is less likely to clog or be contaminated.

Claim 14 — Detector inlet with a swirl aligned to the flow direction.
This is directed at the "rifled tube"/cyclone configuration: a flow passage carries inhaled gas in a flow direction; a flow director creates a circulatory flow whose axis of rotation is aligned with the flow direction (so the gas spirals down the duct), again redistributing the particulates; and a pinhole sampling inlet collects sample from a sampling volume encircled by that swirl.

Claim 17 — Method of detecting a substance of interest.
A method comprising: (a) flowing gas containing the substance of interest along a flow passage that includes a sampling volume; (b) inducing a circulatory flow of the gas within the passage; (c) withdrawing samples through a pinhole sampling inlet from the sampling volume, where the circulatory flow encircles the sampling volume; and (d) supplying the samples to a detector.

Dependent-claim themes (for context)

• Transverse-axis group (cl. 2–6, 18–19): plenum at a bend; outlet transverse to the inlet; inlet cross-section smaller than outlet (slower outlet → promotes recirculation); circulation follows a curved plenum wall; particulate concentration decreases with distance from the wall; inlet flow faster than outlet flow.
• Aligned-axis group (cl. 7–10): cylindrical passage with swirl about its longitudinal axis; inlet and outlet spaced apart along the flow direction; flow director "aligned with a helical path."
• Hardware adjuncts: a mover (jet/actuator) to drive circulation (cl. 11), a heater to vaporize aerosol (cl. 12), and an additional fluid path injecting gas to create the circulation (cl. 13, 15).
• Split outlets (cl. 16): first and second flow outlets at least partly aligned with the flow direction, with the sampling inlet between them.
• Spec workable ranges: passage less than 20 mm wide (down to sub-0.1 mm) and at least ~10 µm; fins extending ≥10 µm from the wall. Analytical apparatus exemplified as mass spectrometer (FIGS. 5–6) or IMS with drift tube/gate/collector (FIGS. 7–8); full claim set is 19 claims.

Related patents in the same family/field

• US 11,774,421 B2 — "Detector inlet and sampling method"
• US 11,585,735 B2 — "Detector with detector inlet for sampling gaseous fluid"
• Both are listed as "similar documents" alongside the '484 patent and derive from the same Smiths Detection Watford program (the GB201405561 priority family).

What I could and could not verify

• Verified (authoritative patent text + multiple listings): title, inventors, assignee, application/filing/priority/issue dates, abstract, claim count and content, family members.
• Not verified: any USPTO assignment-record dispute, IPR/PGR, or CAFC 2026 docket activity for this patent. My searches returned none, and I did not have direct database access to confirm the negative. Treat the absence of litigation as unconfirmed rather than established. If a docket number or case name is provided, I can attempt to cross-check it.

Sources: Google Patents full text for US11067484B2 (https://patents.google.com/patent/US11067484/en); IDIYAS (https://idiyas.com/patent/badge/11067484); Onscope owner listing for Smiths Detection-Watford Limited; FreePatentsOnline US2018/0266923A1.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 11067484 across patent litigation databases.

Let me search more targeted litigation databases.

Let me run a few more targeted searches on litigation-specific sources.

Litigation Search — U.S. Patent No. 11,067,484

Finding: I could not identify any litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 11,067,484.

What the patent is

• Patent: US 11,067,484 B2 — "Apparatus and method for gaseous fluid sampling"
• Inventor(s): Oliver Kirkby, Alastair Clark, Bruce Grant
• Current assignee: Smiths Detection-Watford Limited (U.K.)
• Priority date: 2015-09-30; filed: 2016-09-30; granted: 2021-07-20
• Application: US 15/762,282; Pre-grant pub.: US 2018/0266923 A1
• Family: WO2017055870A1, EP3356784B1, GB2542824B, CN108139301B, JP6875384B2, KR102700491B1, RU2734227C1, MX393910B, PL3356784T3, FI3356784T3
• Status per Google Patents: Active; adjusted expiration 2037-03-28

Litigation

No district-court complaint, CAFC appeal, ITC Section 337 investigation, or PTAB proceeding naming US 11,067,484 as an asserted or challenged patent was found in the sources searched. Accordingly, I cannot provide plaintiff(s), defendant(s), jurisdiction, case number, filing date, or outcome/status, because no case was located.

Notes on false positives (interpreted literally, not auto-corrected)

Several search hits contained the string "11067484" but are not this patent and are unrelated:

• A Czech contract ID "11067484" (Vsetínská nemocnice)
• U.K. Companies House number 11067484 (Sintela Engineering Limited)
• A Tenth Circuit docket entry number [11067484] in Eaves v. Kory, No. 24-1048
• Japanese application JP 11067484 A (JPS60256674A — a lock-up automatic transmission)

Important caveats

1. Not the same as Morpho Detection v. Smiths Detection — I found that historical litigation (Morpho Detection, Inc. v. Smiths Detection, Inc., No. 2:11-cv-00498, E.D. Va.), but it asserted U.S. Patent No. 6,815,670 ("Materials and Apparatus for the Detection of Contraband"), not US 11,067,484. It is not relevant to your query.
2. Search limitation: My searches used general web search and did not return a clean docket-level query against Unified Patents' litigation portal, PACER, or CourtListener for this specific number. The statements above reflect the absence of results in the sources reached, not a definitive confirmation of no litigation. Absence from search results is not proof that no case exists.
3. Recommendation: For a definitive answer, run the number directly in:
   • Unified Patents litigation dashboard — https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation (search "11067484")
   • CourtListener RECAP — https://www.courtlistener.com (docket search)
   • Justia Dockets — https://dockets.justia.com
   • USPTO Patent Center / Assignment records — https://patentcenter.uspto.gov

I do not have high-confidence, source-grounded evidence of any litigation involving US 11,067,484, and I will not fabricate case details to fill that gap.

I'll verify the structured data with targeted searches before reporting.

Let me run more targeted searches on PTAB dockets and the patent family.

PTAB Proceedings on US 11,067,484 — Analyst Report

Patent: US 11,067,484 B2 — "Apparatus and method for gaseous fluid sampling"
Patent Owner: Smiths Detection-Watford Limited (UK)
Inventors: Oliver Kirkby, Alastair Clark, Bruce Grant
Priority: 2015-09-30 (PCT/GB2016/053055, filed 2016-09-30) · Granted: 2021-07-20 · Adjusted expiration on record: 2037-03-28
Source of proceedings list: USPTO Open Data Portal structured block supplied with this task.
Verification searches run 2026-09-24: PTAB docket aggregators, PTAB petition text, the patent number and family numbers, and the assignee name (Smiths Detection-Watford / Smiths Detection Montreal).

⚠️ Confidence note up front. The ODP structured block is authoritative for the proceedings list and returns zero. My supplementary web searches surfaced no petition, institution decision, FWD, termination, or Federal Circuit appeal touching US 11,067,484 or its family. However, third-party aggregators are not exhaustive for very recent filings, and I was unable to do a live PTAB E2E party search in this session. Treat the "zero" as high-confidence but not court-certified — confirm on PTAB E2E by patent number and by "Smiths Detection" as party before relying on it in a filing.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file for US 11,067,484: 0 — no active proceedings, no claims invalidated by the Board, no claims sustained through the Board, no settlements, no institution denials, and no FWDs on appeal. The patent is entirely untested at the PTAB: all 19 claims stand as granted, and no § 315(e)(2) estoppel exists against anyone. A defendant today faces a patent with an un-narrowed claim set and no PTAB roadmap — which cuts both ways: no invalidating FWD to lean on, but also no Board precedent that has already rejected the obviousness theories a challenger would want to run.

Per-proceeding detail

None to report. No proceeding numbers exist to list, and I will not invent placeholder numbers. The absence is documented below with the verification trail.

Strategic summary

Claim status: everything is untested. US 11,067,484 has 19 claims, issued 2021-07-20 with no post-grant amendment, disclaimer, reexamination certificate, or IPR certificate on record. The independent claims are claim 1 (detector inlet with a plenum, pinhole sampling inlet, and a "flow director" creating circulatory flow encircling the sampling inlet), claim 14 (detector inlet with a flow passage, circulatory flow whose axis is aligned with the flow direction, and a pinhole sampling inlet), and claim 17 (method of inducing circulatory flow around a sampling volume and sampling through a pinhole). Dependent claims 2–13 and 15–16 add the transverse-axis bend geometry (claims 2–6), the helical-fin/flow-director species (claim 10), a mover (claim 11), a heater (claim 12), and an additional fluid path (claims 13, 15). None of claims 1–19 is canceled, disclaimed, or held unpatentable. Any demand letter citing claim 1 is citing a live claim.

Estoppel landscape: a clean slate. Because no IPR, PGR, or CBM was ever instituted, § 315(e)(2) estoppel is nonexistent — no petitioner, privy, or real party in interest is barred from raising any § 102 or § 103 ground, including art that was cited during prosecution. That is materially more freedom than a defendant usually gets. Two practical boundaries remain: (i) § 315(b) still bars an IPR petition filed more than one year after that defendant is served with a complaint alleging infringement, so a newly-sued defendant must calendar the one-year date immediately; and (ii) the § 325(d) discretion framework means the Board may lean on art already before the Examiner — and the prosecution file here is well-populated. The examiner considered US 2004/0227073 A1 (Krasnobaev, Modified vortex for an ion mobility spectrometer), US 7,574,930 B2 (Implant Sciences, Trace chemical sensing), US 2012/0080593 A1 (Osaka Univ., Cyclone Separator Type Mass Analyzing System), WO 2008/116943 A1 (probe for sampling gases with high particle content), WO 2014/194424 A1 (portable PM2.5 monitor), US 2011/0186436 A1 (Enertechnix, particle interrogation), US 5,355,719 A (Horiba drain separator), and CA 1,036,387 A (Barthlow, Sampling and analysis of gas from a stream of fluid containing solid particles). The centrifugal/cyclonic particle-separation concept in a gas-sampling inlet is squarely in the cited art, so the realistic IPR battleground is a § 103 combination built on those references — not a bare anticipation theory.

A genuinely useful § 112(b) hook. Claim 12 recites "a heater to heat the gaseous fluid in the flow passage," but claim 12 depends from claim 1, and claim 1 recites a plenum — the phrase "flow passage" appears in claim 1's preamble only as the path through which fluid is "provid[ed] ... to a plenum." That is a live antecedent-basis / indefiniteness argument in district court and a possible § 112 ground in a PGR-track challenge. Separately, the Non-Patent Citation of record — Spangler, The Pinhole Interface for IMS/MS, NASA Johnson Space Center, Third International Workshop on Ion Mobility Spectrometry, pp. 115–133 (1995) — is directly on point for the "pinhole inlet" limitation that the patent owner added to claims 1, 14, and 17, and is worth mining for a motivation-to-combine narrative.

Procedural routes that are now closed. The post-AIA nature of the priority date (2015-09-30, after 2013-03-16) matters for forum selection: PGR was available only for nine months from grant, i.e. through roughly 2022-04-20, and is time-barred. CBM is unavailable — this is an analytical-instrument patent, not a "financial product or service," and CBM has sunset for patents issuing on or after 2020-09-16. IPR is the only viable AIA trial vehicle against the '484 patent today.

Pattern signals. Nothing to pattern-match: no repeat petitioner, no IPR filings at all, and no PTAB appeals by the patent owner on this patent. There is no evidence of a defensive aggregator (no Unified Patents or RPX-style entity) in the chain — the '484 patent's prosecution and prosecution-appeal history shows no third-party involvement. My searches also surfaced no public district-court assertion of US 11,067,484; that is a negative finding, not a certified absence, and I would not state it as fact without a PACER/RPX check. The family is broad and co-pending, which is worth monitoring: sibling patents US 11,585,735 B2 ("Detector with detector inlet for sampling gaseous fluid," granted 2023-02-21) and US 11,774,421 B2 ("Detector inlet and sampling method," granted 2023-10-03), plus CA 2999231 C ("Apparatus and method for sampling"), give the owner multiple assertion vehicles. A challenge mounted against the '484 patent will not necessarily disable the family.

Why the silence? US 11,067,484 is a specialty analytical-instrument patent owned by an operating company (Smiths Detection) in the trace-detection/CBRNE space. Patents of that profile are typically cross-licensed, sold into government channels, or asserted against a small number of competitors — not mass-asserted against a long tail of defendants. Low assertional visibility is the most likely reason no IPR has been filed, but I cannot confirm that from the record and I flag it as inference, not finding.

Recommended next steps

1. Confirm the null result before relying on it. Run a party-name search for "Smiths Detection" and a patent-number search on PTAB E2E and cross-check the PTAB's AIA trials statistics and the patent's Patent Center transaction history at patentcenter.uspto.gov. Any IPR filed in the last ~12 months may not yet be reflected in the aggregators or the ODP ingest.
2. There is no FWD to quote and no disposition link to give you — the standard defendant's playbook ("your claim is already canceled, see Paper X") is unavailable here. Do not cite a proceeding that does not exist. If opposing counsel represents otherwise, demand the proceeding number and pull the paper yourself.
3. Because no estoppel attaches, every ground is open. As a design matter, that means you can build a § 103 challenge on the very art the examiner cited (Krasnobaev, Implant Sciences, Osaka Univ., Barthlow, Horiba) without a § 325(d) avoidance strategy being forced on you — though you should still expect the Board to exercise § 325(d) discretion and should therefore lead with art not in the file history if any exists.
4. Watch the statutory clocks from day one of service. If you are served with a complaint asserting the '484 patent, § 315(b) gives you one year to file an IPR; a parallel ITC action or a DJ action does not necessarily reset it. Note also that a preliminary injunction motion in district court would likely arrive well before any institution decision.
5. Evaluate the family, not just this patent. Before settlement discussions, map US 11,585,735 and US 11,774,421 and the Canadian sibling to see whether neutralizing the '484 patent actually clears the field.
6. Calendar for cause. Absent any estoppel or PTAB activity, the patent's adjusted expiration of 2037-03-28 gives the owner a long runway — there is no near-term external event that will moot the exposure.

Sources relied on

• USPTO Open Data Portal structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block (authoritative; returns no AIA trial proceedings).
• Full patent text, US 11,067,484 B2: https://patents.google.com/patent/US11067484/en (claims, prosecution-cited art, Non-Patent Citations, family and family-cites lists, legal events).
• PTAB E2E (for independent verification): https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/
• USPTO Patent Center (assignment and post-grant certificates): https://patentcenter.uspto.gov/
• CourtListener (Federal Circuit docket cross-check): https://www.courtlistener.com/

Stated limitations: I found no document of any kind — petition, notice of accord, institution decision, FWD, adverse judgment, settlement, or CAFC notice of appeal — concerning this patent. I did not locate a live PTAB E2E query result confirming the null; that verification step is recommended before this memo is relied on in a filing or client advice. No proceeding numbers, judge names, dates, or dispositions have been invented, and none are supplied above.

I'll research the assignment/ownership record for US 11,067,484, starting with the assignment data surfaced in the authoritative patent text and cross-checking with assignment/litigation sources.

Let me dig into the specific assignment record (reel 046445/0754) and check for any additional recordings.

Significant development found — let me verify the assignment record details, the correspondent of record, and the recent CVC acquisition's IP implications.

Assignment Record Analysis — US 11,067,484 B2

Data-availability caveat up front. I could not directly query the USPTO Assignment Center (assignmentcenter.uspto.gov) or its legacy mirror (assignment.uspto.gov) from this environment — those portals are not reachable here, and the searches I ran did not return a clean, citable Assignment-Center record page. What I can ground reliably is the assignment data embedded in the authoritative Google Patents legal-events feed for this patent, which reproduces the USPTO recorded-assignment abstract (conveyance type, assignors, assignee, execution window, and reel/frame). That is the basis for the timeline below. The correspondent of record — the field you flagged as the most useful NPE tell — is not exposed in the Google Patents legal-events text, so I am unable to report it and will not guess it. Verify directly at the Assignment Center before relying on any conclusion that turns on the correspondent.

Inventors

• Employer at time of filing: all three are assignors to Smiths Detection‑Watford Limited, and the GB equivalent register entries (UK application GB1517310.7, EP 3105564/3356784 family) list the same three inventors under assignee Smiths Detection‑Watford Limited (Century House, Maylands Avenue, Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire HP2 7DE). On the evidence, all three were Smiths Detection–Watford employees, not outside consultants.
• Unusual-pattern check: not present. The "inventors‑depart‑then‑fire‑sale" pattern does not appear here — Alastair Clark in particular recurs across many later Smiths Detection–Watford filings (the same corporate inventor pool that produced US 11,585,735 and US 11,774,421), which is consistent with a retained in-house R&D team rather than a departing-inventor cluster. I found no evidence any of the three left before or shortly after the 2016-09-30 filing date; I state that as an absence of evidence, not a verified negative.

Original assignee

• Entity named on the issued patent: Smiths Detection–Watford Limited (U.K.), recorded also as "Smiths Detection Watford Ltd." Original assignee per the patent front page.
• Line of business: threat-detection and security-screening instrumentation — ion mobility spectrometers, mass spectrometers, X-ray/CT baggage and cargo scanners, trace detectors. This is an operating industrial business, not a licensing vehicle.
• Product embodying the claims: The patent is an inlet/sampling architecture for handheld and portable detectors (the specification frames it explicitly around "hand-held, or portable devices … used by military and security personnel"). Smiths Detection ships commercial handheld trace detectors; whether any specific shipping SKU reads on the issued claims I could not verify from public sources, so treat "product embodies the claims" as plausible but unverified.
• Parentage / current status: Smiths Detection–Watford Limited sat within Smiths Group plc (FTSE 100, U.K.) at filing. On 2025-12-03 Smiths Group announced the sale of the Smiths Detection division to funds advised by CVC Capital Partners at an enterprise value of £2bn; the sale completed 2026-06-30 (https://www.smiths.com/news-and-insights/news/2026/completion-of-smiths-detection-sale ; https://www.smithsdetection.com/separation/). Status of the division: operating, now private-equity-owned.
• Bankruptcy: none. No Chapter 7/11, no administration, no insolvency proceedings surfaced.

Assignment timeline

The patent's legal-events feed shows exactly one recorded assignment — the original inventor→company assignment. No post-issuance transfer is recorded in any source I could reach.

• Executed 2017-07-26 → 2018-04-12 / recorded 2018-07-24 — Reel 046445 / 0754
  • Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors' Interest (i.e., a standard Assignment)
  • Assignors: KIRKBY, Oliver; CLARK, Alastair; GRANT, Bruce (individuals)
  • Assignee: SMITHS DETECTION-WATFORD LIMITED (United Kingdom)
  • Correspondent: not disclosed in the feed I could access — could not retrieve attorney/firm/address. Recurrence flag therefore cannot be assessed; this is the one field you specifically wanted and it is the one field the available source does not carry. Pull reel 046445/0754 directly in the Assignment Center to obtain it.
  • Context: initial inventor assignment to the operating employer, executed contemporaneously with U.S. national-stage entry of PCT/GB2016/053055 (the national-phase "dispatch from pre-exam" event is dated 2018-03-22, matching the execution window). Ordinary corporate intake — not a fire-sale, internal reorg, securitization, or transfer-to-asserter.

Ownership-affecting event outside the assignment record (flag this): the 2025–2026 CVC acquisition of Smiths Detection. Because the public reporting and the Smiths Group completion notice describe a sale of the Smiths Detection business/division, this is most likely an equity (share) purchase in which the legal entity Smiths Detection–Watford Limited survived as the CVC-owned owner. If so, underlying patent title did not change hands and no USPTO assignment record would be generated — which is consistent with my finding of no post-2018 recording. I could not confirm the deal structure (asset vs. share) from the sources reached, so I flag this as an ownership change of the corporate parent, with the registered patent owner appearing unchanged. This is a legitimate candidate for a future/supplemental record if the deal was structured as an asset transfer; verify in the Assignment Center.

Statement required by your rubric: aside from the single 2018 inventor→company assignment, the Assignment Center surfaces no records for this patent based on the sources I could access — meaning, on the evidence, the original operating assignee (or its post-CVC successor entity) still owns US 11,067,484.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 11067484
    2015 : Priority filed in UK by Smiths Detection
    2016 : US PCT application filed
    2017 : Inventors execute assignment to employer
    2018 : Assignment recorded reel 046445 0754
         : US national stage entry
    2021 : Patent granted
    2025 : Smiths Group announces sale of Detection unit
    2026 : CVC completes Smiths Detection acquisition

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Verdict

Insufficient data — in the narrow, literal rubric sense of "only the original assignment."

Justification: the entire recorded chain consists of a single instrument — the inventors' assignment to Smiths Detection‑Watford Limited, executed 2017-07-26 to 2018-04-12 and recorded 2018-07-24 at reel 046445/0754 — with no post-issuance transfer, no litigation, and no shell/NPE/defensive-aggregator links. Under your rubric that trigger ("or only the original assignment") maps to Insufficient data, because there is no NPE-style chain to score. I want to be explicit, however, that the affirmative evidence points one way and one way only: every NPE signal is not present, the assignee is a genuine operating instrument company at a real corporate address, and even the 2026 change of control (CVC's completion of the £2bn Smiths Detection acquisition on 2026-06-30, per smiths.com) is a private-equity buyout of an operating business rather than a monetization play. In substance this is a clean operating-company patent, not an NPE asset — the "Insufficient data" label reflects the absence of any NPE-relevant chain, not uncertainty about whether this is a troll.

Two open items that could change the picture: (a) the correspondent of record on reel 046445/0754 was not retrievable here and should be pulled from the Assignment Center; and (b) whether the CVC deal was structured as a share purchase (title unchanged, as I suspect) or an asset transfer (which would eventually generate a new record). Verify at the USPTO Assignment Center — https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ — searching patent number 11067484.

I'll research the prior-art references cited against US 11,067,484. Let me run searches on the patent itself and its cited references.

Let me gather details on several more of the cited references.

Prior-Art Analysis — US 11,067,484 B2 ("Apparatus and method for gaseous fluid sampling")

Scope, method, and one important correction to the record

Method note. I queried the web for each cited reference by its literal number. I was able to retrieve substantive full-text/abstract content for the four highest-value references (US 5,355,719; US 2004/0227073 / US 6,870,155; US 2012/0080593; WO 2008/116943) plus the Spangler NPL citation. I reached my tool-call limit before retrieving the full text of the remaining cited documents, so for those I rely on the bibliographic data in the authoritative Google Patents record you supplied and on title-level characterization — flagged explicitly below. I did not fabricate any content for references I could not open.

Correction to the earlier sections (flagged as required). The summary and litigation sections in this file concern the same patent but should not be read as prior-art work. Nothing in them contradicts what follows, but note one dated discrepancy: the earlier litigation section is captioned "Current Date: April 26, 2026," while this task specifies 2026-09-24. The patent and its family status are unaffected (still Active; 4th-year maintenance fee paid 2025-01-06).

Legal frame. § 102 anticipation requires a single reference to disclose every element of a claim, arranged as claimed. US 11,067,484 has effective priority 2015‑09‑30 (GB1517310.7), so all cited art predates it. Importantly, the prosecution history shows the claims were rejected and then allowed only after amendment/argument (non-final actions 2019‑12‑27 and 2020‑11‑20; final rejection 2020‑06‑10; after-final response 2020‑08‑19; Notice of Allowance 2021‑03‑17). So these references were applied in examination but were not fatal as issued. I could not retrieve the actual office-action text, so my claim mapping below is an independent technical reading, not a reconstruction of the examiner's rejections.

A. The 12 patent citations of record

Reference-by-reference

1. CA 1036387 A — "Sampling and analysis of gas from a stream of fluid containing solid particles" (Barthlow, 1978).
Description (title-level; full text not retrieved): Canadian patent directed to extracting and analyzing a gas sample from a particle-laden process stream — i.e., a probe/sampler that must cope with entrained solids.
Claim potential: Most relevant to the general preamble and purpose of claims 1 and 14 (sampling a gaseous fluid that "carries particulates"). It does not disclose a pinhole sampling inlet, a plenum with an encircling circulatory flow, or the recited redistribution of particulates, so it does not anticipate any independent claim. Best viewed as background art under § 102(a)/(b) affecting only the field/purpose.

2. US 5,355,719 A — "Drain separator in gas analyzer" (Kohsaka et al., Horiba; filed 1992‑07‑22, granted 1994‑10‑18).
Description (verified): A sample-gas inlet passage (6) contains a twisted spiral member/vane (7) that revolves the sample gas as it is spouted into a downwardly divergent conical separating chamber (2). Centrifugal force flings higher-density drain/condensate to the circumferential wall (2a), where it exits via a peripheral drain/exhaust passage (3). A sample-gas-outlet passage (8) sits coaxially facing the inlet and is described as being "smaller (same as or slightly larger) than" the inlet; the centre of the low-pressure swirling flow "containing little condensate" is drawn through passage 8 to the gas analyzer.

This is structurally the closest of the cited patent documents to the '484 concept of swirl → particles centrifuged outward → clean central extraction.
Claim potential:

• Claim 10 ("flow director comprises a structure aligned with a helical path") — the twisted spiral vane 7 is arguably such a structure. Strong § 102(b) candidate for that dependent claim's structure in isolation.
• Claim 14 — the passage 6 + spiral member 7 create a circulatory/swirling flow, and the conical chamber is essentially a "flow passage"; but the reference's outlet 8 is a conduit facing a central point, not a "pinhole … collecting samples from a sampling volume encircled by the circulatory flow," and the axis geometry differs (swirl axis is along the bulk flow into the chamber, with the take-off counter-facing the inlet). Likely anticipation candidate only if claim 14's "pinhole sampling inlet" is construed broadly — which is doubtful.
• Claim 1 — no closed "plenum … enclosed internal volume" with a sampling volume encircled by recirculation; no pinhole. Does not anticipate.

3. US 2004/0227073 A1 — "Modified vortex for an ion mobility spectrometer" (Krasnobaev & Bunker, Implant Sciences; filed 2004‑04‑05; granted as US 6,870,155 B2, 2005‑03‑22).
Description (verified): In addition to a first (sampling-vacuum) orifice, one or more second orifices emit a gas that is deflected into a circular/vortex motion about the axis of the sampling orifice, creating a "virtual tube" of moving gas. A radially-outward centrifugal force restrains the emitted gas from being drawn into the sampling orifice; the emitted gas may be heated (resistive/IR/visible/Peltier/flame) to promote vaporization, and may carry additives. Variants: "projected vortex," "surrounding vortex," compound arrays, and a cone-shaped cyclone nozzle using deflection vanes or tangential gas flow (FIGS. 6B/6C).
Claim potential — this is the single most dangerous reference for the dependent claims:

• Claim 13 / Claim 15 ("additional fluid path configured to direct additional gaseous fluid into the flow … to create the circulatory flow") — directly met by the second orifice(s) emitting gas into a vortex. Strong § 102 candidate, especially for claim 15 as written.
• Claim 12 (heater to heat the gaseous fluid) — met by the disclosed heated vortex gas; relevant if read onto the heater limitation (though the '484 heater is "in the flow passage," and this reference heats the emitted jet).
• Claim 11 (mover) — partially relevant (a second gas pump drives the vortex).
• Claim 14 — the emitted, deflected gas is a "flow director … [creating] a circulatory flow … with an axis of rotation aligned with the flow direction," and sample is drawn through the central orifice. But the reference does not disclose a "flow passage for carrying an inhaled flow … in a flow direction" with the sampling volume "encircled by the circulatory flow" as a ducted cyclone; the vortex is a free-space gas curtain. Anticipation of independent claim 14 is a real § 102 stretch; anticipation of claims 13/15 is the sounder threat.
• US 7,574,930 B2 (#4 below) is the same Implant Sciences program and should be evaluated together.

4. US 7,574,930 B2 — "Trace chemical sensing" (Implant Sciences; filed from the same 2002‑02‑15 priority cluster; granted 2009‑08‑18).
Description (title-level; not opened): Implant Sciences trace-detection patent in the same family/program as the Krasnobaev vortex work (the two share the 2002‑02‑15 priority date and assignee).
Claim potential: Same vortex-sampling concept, so most relevant to claims 11, 12, 13, 15 as an alternative or companion § 102(a)/(b) reference. I flag this as provisional: I could not confirm its specific disclosure, so do not rely on it as an anticipatory reference without opening the document.

5. WO 2008/116943 A1 — "Probe for taking samples of gases with high particle content" (Ingeniería Energética y de Contaminación, S.A.; inventors Delgado Lozano et al.; pub. 2008‑10‑02).
Description (verified, from the applicant's abstract): A circular-section conduit (1) traversed longitudinally by a shaft (3) bearing a helix/propeller (4) at one end. The helix rotates so that the spiral advance is directed toward the probe end sitting in the process stream, producing a "cylindrical breaking surface" that prevents any accumulated material from clogging the aspiration orifice, and transporting material back out.
Claim potential:

• Claim 10 ("flow director comprises a structure aligned with a helical path") — met by the propeller/helix. Strong § 102(b) candidate for that dependent claim.
• Claim 14 — the helix is a rotating flow director inside a flow passage; however, no "circulatory flow whose axis of rotation is aligned with the flow direction" that "encircles" a sampling volume is disclosed (the helix is an auger/anti-fouling device, not a cyclone), and there is no pinhole sampling inlet. Anticipation unlikely.
• Purpose overlap with claim 1 (inhibiting particulate clogging) is strong but structural overlap is incomplete.

6. RU 2390750 C2 — "Method of monitoring impurities in air" (ООО "УНИСИТ"; pub. 2010‑05‑27).
Description: Not retrieved; title-level only. It is a Russian air-impurity monitoring method and was cited (not examiner-starred) apparently as general state of the art.
Claim potential: I cannot responsibly map this to any claim. Treat as unverified; likely background § 102(a) art at most.

7. US 2011/0186436 A1 — "Particle Interrogation Devices and Methods" (Enertechnix, Inc.; pub. 2011‑08‑04). Examiner-cited.
Description (title-level; not opened): Particle interrogation (aerodynamic/optical focusing and sizing of airborne particles).
Claim potential: Relevant to the particulate-handling/instrumentation context and possibly to claims referencing particulate distribution (claim 6), but its focus is interrogating particles, not excluding them from a pinhole. No anticipation indicated. Provisional/unverified.

8. US 2012/0080593 A1 — "Cyclone Separator Type Mass Analyzing System" (Osaka University; priority 2009‑06‑10 as JP, pub. 2012‑04‑05; JP 5435667).
Description (verified): A swirl generating container (9) with an intake port (11) and a swirl generating device (13) = turbo blade (17) driven by a hollow motor (19). Gas is swirled; heavier/dust material is flung outward and exhausted (15); the light/clean "target gas" is concentrated at the centre, where a reduced-pressure zone forms, and is drawn through the hollow, coaxial centre into a mass analyzer (5) via the introduction port (3). The rotation centre of the turbo blade is coaxial with the sampling port axis.
Claim potential:

• Claim 7 ("circulatory flow circulates about an axis of rotation aligned with the flow direction") — met by the cyclone swirl. Good § 102 candidate for this dependent claim.
• Claim 8 ("plenum comprises a cylinder and the axis of rotation is aligned with a longitudinal axis of the cylinder") — met by the cylindrical swirl container; the coaxial hollow-motor centre is the take-off. Likely § 102 candidate for claim 8.
• Claim 11 ("mover arranged to move gaseous fluid around the circulatory flow") — the turbo blade/hollow motor is literally a mover driving the circulation. Strong § 102 candidate for claim 11.
• Claim 14 — a ducted cyclone with centre extraction to an analyzer maps well onto "flow passage … circulatory flow … axis aligned with flow direction … sample collected from a sampling volume encircled by the circulatory flow," except the take-off here is an analyzer-introduction port on the cyclone centreline rather than a "pinhole sampling inlet" per se. This is the most plausible § 102 challenge to claim 14 among the retrieved references, but success turns on the pinhole limitation.
• Claims 1–2 (transverse-axis plenum recirculation) — not met.

9. WO 2013/004903 A1 — "Sampler" (Metso Automation Oy; pub. 2013‑01‑10).
Description: Not retrieved (title-level). Metso is a process-automation vendor; a "sampler" here is likely a process-stream sampling device.
Claim potential: Possible § 102 relevance to the flow-inlet / sampling-inlet concepts of claim 1 generally, but I cannot map it to a specific claim without the text. Unverified.

10. US 2014/0264021 A1 — "Ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) device with charged material transportation chamber" (Smiths Detection Montreal; pub. 2014‑09‑18). Examiner-cited.
Description (title-level; not opened): An IMS instrument with a chamber transporting charged material toward the spectrometer — same assignee group (Smiths) as the '484 patent.
Claim potential: Relevant to the analytical-apparatus / detector coupling aspect of claims 1, 14, 17 (Ion mobility spectrometer as the downstream analyzer). No structural anticipation of the particulate-separation claims is indicated. Provisional.

11. WO 2014/194424 A1 — "Method and apparatus for a portable PM2.5 monitoring device" (Z. Tan; pub. 2014‑12‑11).
Description (title-level; not opened): Portable particulate (PM2.5) monitor — likely cyclone/impactor-based particle classification.
Claim potential: Potential § 102 relevance to the particulate-spatial-distribution / cyclone concepts of claims 6 and 7–9, and background art to the anti-clogging purpose. Without the text I cannot map it to an anticipatory disclosure. Provisional.

12. US 2015/0300927 A1 — "Sample probe inlet flow system" (M. Easton; pub. 2015‑10‑22). Examiner-cited.
Description (title-level; not opened): A sample-probe inlet flow system — directly on point for the flow inlet / probe-to-instrument interface recited in claims 1 and 14.
Claim potential: The most likely of the "title-level" group to bear on the flow inlet / flow director limitations, and hence on claims 1 and 14 as a § 102(a) reference. Because I could not open it, I flag this as the reference most worth retrieving next, alongside #3/#4. Provisional.

B. The 12 family-cited references (references cited in the family members' prosecution)

These are listed as family citations (a mix of examiner- and third-party-cited across the GB/EP/PCT/other family members). I could not open any of these; treatment is bibliographic plus title-level.

Most relevant of these for § 102 purposes:

• US 6,532,835 B1 (cyclonic air sampler) and US 9,415,339 B2 (particle collection device) — cyclone/particle-separation art that could bear on claims 6–9 and 14 (swirl-induced particulate redistribution). Not anticipatory on their face, but the closest procedural § 103 companions.
• GB 201405561 D0 / "Detector inlet and sampling method" — the applicant's own earlier filing and the direct ancestor of the family leading to US 11,774,421 and US 11,585,735 noted in the earlier summary. This is same-inventor/own-work material; it is not prior art against claim 1 via § 102(b) unless published >1 year, but it is the strongest § 102(a)/(e) / double-patenting concern and should be reviewed for overlapping disclosure of the detector inlet.

C. Non-patent literature citations (7)

Six are prosecution documents, not prior art: the Combined Search and Examination Report (GB1517310.7, 2016‑07‑22), two GB Examination Reports (2019‑07‑17 and 2019‑12‑11), the PCT International Search Report (PCT/GB2016/053055, 2016‑12‑22), and two RU Office Actions (2018113751/05, 2019‑12‑09). These are useful only to reconstruct what the examiners relied on.

The one substantive NPL prior-art reference is:

Spangler, Glenn E., "The Pinhole Interface for IMS/MS," NASA/Johnson Space Center, Third International Workshop on Ion Mobility Spectrometry, pp. 115–133 (1995). Examiner-cited.

• Description: A foundational treatment of the pinhole (membrane/pinhole) interface for coupling an atmospheric-pressure ion source to a mass spectrometer — i.e., the very sampling-inlet architecture recited in claims 1, 14 and 17.
• Claim potential: Directly on point for the "sampling inlet comprises a pinhole inlet" limitation. It strongly informs the construction of that term and is the reference most likely to have been used to read the pinhole limitation onto the art during prosecution. Because the Spangler paper is about the interface itself (not about particulate exclusion via an encircling cyclone), it cannot alone anticipate claim 1 or 14 — but it is the key reference for the pinhole element and for any § 112 construction dispute.

D. Overall § 102 assessment

1. No single cited reference appears to anticipate independent claim 1. Claim 1 requires the concurrence of (a) an enclosed plenum with a sampling volume, (b) a pinhole sampling inlet, and (c) a flow director creating circulatory flow around the enclosed volume that encircles the sampling inlet so that particulates are preferentially swept past to the outlet. The references supply these elements dispersed: Horiba (swirl + central clean-gas take-off, US 5,355,719), Osaka (ducted cyclone + coaxial analyzer take-off, US 2012/0080593), Spangler (pinhole interface), and Krasnobaev (vortex curtain around a sampling orifice). This dispersion is consistent with the patent having been allowed only after overcoming a final rejection by amendment/argument.

2. The most credible § 102 candidates are the dependent claims, not the independents:

   • Claim 15 and Claim 13 (additional fluid path creating the circulatory flow) → US 2004/0227073 / US 6,870,155 (Krasnobaev) is the strongest anticipatory threat.
   • Claim 11 (mover driving the circulation) and Claim 8 (cylindrical plenum, axis = longitudinal axis) → US 2012/0080593 (Osaka) turbo-blade/hollow-motor cyclone.
   • Claim 10 (structure aligned with a helical path) → US 5,355,719 (Horiba spiral vane) and WO 2008/116943 (rotating helix probe).
   • Claim 7 (swirl axis aligned with flow direction) → US 2012/0080593 and US 5,355,719.

3. The pinhole element is the linchpin. The '484 patent is the only document in this set that combines a pinhole inlet with an encircling circulatory/centrifuge flow in an enclosed plenum. Any § 102 case against claim 1 or 14 will depend on whether the prior art's central take-off (Horiba passage 8; Osaka's hollow-motor centre) qualifies as a "pinhole," and on whether the "encircling" recirculation is disclosed. On the retrieved evidence it is not, which is why the claims issued.

4. Do not overstate. Several references (CA 1036387; RU 2390750; US 7,574,930; US 2011/0186436; US 2014/0264021; US 2015/0300927; WO 2013/004903; WO 2014/194424; and the entire family-citations table) I could only characterize at the title/bibliographic level. For those I make no § 102 assertion, and I recommend retrieving the full texts — prioritising US 2015/0300927 (Easton sample-probe inlet flow system) and US 7,574,930 (Implant Sciences trace chemical sensing) — before relying on them.

Grounding

• Patent and citation data: Google Patents full text for US 11,067,484 B2, https://patents.google.com/patent/US11067484/en (authoritative record supplied in-file), corroborated by IDIYAS, https://idiyas.com/patent/badge/[11067484](/patent/11067484), and FreePatentsOnline, https://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2018/0266923.html.
• US 5,355,719: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5355719 and the granted PDF, https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/61/91/68/51a3e19f72441c/US5355719.pdf.
• US 2004/0227073 A1 / US 6,870,155 B2: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20040227073A1/en and https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/8a/5b/01/202c5e383698df/US6870155.pdf.
• US 2012/0080593 A1: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20120080593 (and FPO, https://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2012/0080593.html).
• WO 2008/116943 A1: applicant abstract via Universidad de Sevilla, https://prisma.us.es/resultado/1467.
• Spangler 1995 pinhole-interface NPL citation: listed in the Google Patents NPL table for US 11,067,484.

I could not open CA 1036387, US 7,574,930, RU 2390750, US 2011/0186436, WO 2013/004903, US 2014/0264021, WO 2014/194424, US 2015/0300927, or any of the twelve family citations, and I have not asserted specific disclosures for them.

I'll analyze prior art references from the patent's Citations section to assess obviousness. Let me gather details on the key references.

Let me gather details on additional prior art references from the citation list.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 11,067,484 B2

Under 35 U.S.C. § 103; using the Prior Art section of the patent (Citations: 12 references; Family Cites: 12; Non-Patent Citations: 7)

1. Framing and legal standard

The § 103 inquiry follows Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966): scope/content of the prior art, differences between the art and the claims, level of ordinary skill, and secondary considerations. Under KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007), the claimed subject matter is obvious where the elements are known, the combination yields no more than predictable results, and there is an apparent reason (explicit or inferred) to combine. The patent's effective filing date is 2015-09-30, so only references with effective dates before then are § 102-eligible prior art. All 12 cited references (1974–2015) qualify; note that US 2015/0300927 A1 published 2015-10-22 (after the priority date) but has a 2012-09-21 priority date and therefore qualifies as § 102(a)(2) art.

Level of ordinary skill (proposed): a B.S. in mechanical or analytical engineering/chemistry, or equivalent, with ~2–3 years' experience designing sampling inlets/interfaces for ion mobility or mass spectrometers, or an M.S. with ~1 year. The field is mature and highly predictable in its fluid-mechanics principles.

Key claim terms (construed to assess § 103):

• "plenum … enclosed internal volume" — a chamber bounded by walls, not the open ambient space of a hand-held nozzle.
• "circulatory flow … encircling the sampling inlet" — a recirculating/swirling flow whose streamlines loop around the sampling location.
• "pinhole inlet" — a small-orifice sampling interface (expressly acknowledged as known in the NPL: Spangler, The Pinhole Interface for IMS/MS, NASA 1995).
• "increase a relative proportion of the particulates carried past the sampling inlet … without entering the sampling volume" — the centrifugal exclusion effect; this is a functional statement of the well-known cyclone principle.

The file history shows a final rejection (2020-06-10) and allowance only after a Response After Final (2020-08-19), indicating the claims were narrowed to overcome art — most likely by the "pinhole" and "enclosed internal volume … encircling" limitations. That narrowness is where the § 103 case must be pressed.

2. The cited references and what each discloses

3. Claim 1 — primary combination renders it obvious

Combination: Horiba US 5,355,719 (primary) + Spangler pinhole NPL + Krasnobaev US 6,870,155 (secondary).

Only differences: (i) a pinhole specifically, rather than a small coaxial passage; (ii) the functional particulate-exclusion language, and (iii) a "recirculating" vs. "single-pass revolving" characterization.

Motivation to combine (KSR):

• Horiba and Krasnobaev are in the same field (gas sampling for analytical instruments) and address the same problem — preventing contaminant/particulate from reaching the off-take/analyzer.
• Krasnobaev expressly teaches the very result the claim recites (centrifugal radial-outward force excluding material from a sampling orifice) and even applies it to an IMS and adds a heater to vaporize particles — supplying the rationale and the "particulates" context.
• Substituting a pinhole for Horiba's outlet passage 8 is a predictable, routine design choice: Spangler shows pinholes are the standard IMS/MS interface; both are small orifices drawing sample from a gas volume; a skilled artisan would expect the same result (limited-flow sample transfer) with no change in the separation principle.
• The combination merely arranges known elements (vane-induced swirl + central off-take + pinhole) with each performing its known function → predictable result, satisfying KSR and In re Keller.

Conclusion: Claim 1 is obvious.

4. Claim 14 — independently obvious, and near-anticipated by Osaka

Combination: Osaka US 2012/0080593 (primary) + Spangler pinhole + Horiba US 5,355,719.

Claim 14 requires: a flow passage carrying inhaled gas in a flow direction; a flow director creating circulatory flow whose axis of rotation is aligned with the flow direction; and a pinhole sampling inlet collecting from a sampling volume encircled by the circulatory flow.

• Osaka discloses precisely a swirl generating container in which the gas swirls about an axis aligned with the flow, a center portion (the sampling volume) encircled by the swirl that is dust-depleted, and a port coaxial with the swirl center feeding the gas to a mass spectrometer. This is claim 14 minus the "pinhole" characterization.
• Spangler supplies the pinhole inlet.
• Horiba supplies the vane-type flow director and the coaxial central off-take.

Motivation: Osaka's stated objective — removing dust and delivering clean gas to a compact, portable atmospheric mass analyzer — is the same objective as claim 14 (avoiding particulate clogging/contamination of the sampling inlet). The combination is a predictable application of cyclone separation to a pinhole MS interface. Claim 14 is obvious (and arguably anticipated by Osaka + pinhole art, given Osaka's express "hollow" center and dust removal).

5. Claim 17 — method claim obvious (inherent practice)

Claim 17 is a method of (a) flowing gas along a flow passage including a sampling volume, (b) inducing a circulatory flow, (c) withdrawing samples through a pinhole from a sampling volume encircled by the circulatory flow, and (d) providing samples to a detector.

Operating the apparatus of Horiba (swirl + central off-take to analyzer) or Osaka (cyclone + center port to mass spec) inherently performs steps (a)–(d); adding the Spangler pinhole completes step (c). Where a method claim recites the inherent operation of a known apparatus, it is unpatentable (In re King, In re Kuehl). Claim 17 is obvious.

6. Dependent claims — claim-by-claim

7. Why the combinations are proper (motivation, no teaching away)

1. Same field / same problem. All primary references (Horiba, Krasnobaev, Osaka, IECSA, Enertechnix) concern sampling particle-laden gas into an analytical instrument. The claimed invention solves exactly this problem via the well-known cyclone/centrifugal principle.
2. Express recognition of the claimed result. Krasnobaev (US 6,870,155) expressly states that the vortex produces a radially-outward centrifugal force that restrains material from the sampling orifice; Osaka expressly removes dust and delivers clean center gas to a mass spectrometer. Thus the functional "increase a relative proportion of the particulates carried past the sampling inlet" is not an unrecognized discovery.
3. Predictable results. Swirl-induced radial particulate segregation and center off-take are textbook fluid mechanics (as the applicant itself concedes by adopting the cyclone analogy). Combining them with a standard pinhole interface (Spangler) yields no unexpected result.
4. Design incentives / market pressure. The patent's own background notes the demand for portable/hand-held detectors in dusty, hostile environments. That articulated need (long-standing, per the cited art from 1974 onward) supplies a clear motivation to adopt centrifugal particle exclusion at the sampling inlet.
5. No teaching away. None of the cited references disparages centrifugal separation at a sampling inlet; Horiba's only stated drawback (reduced responsiveness due to retention in the chamber) is addressed by its own coaxial, immediate center off-take — the same approach the '484 adopts.

8. Secondary considerations

No evidence of record in the cited material establishes unexpected results, long-felt unmet need, failure of others, or commercial success with nexus. The purported advantage (vapor diffuses into the particle-depleted region while particles are centrifuged out) is the predictable operation of any cyclone (cf. Horiba, Osaka) and therefore likely lacks the required nexus. Any commercial success of Smiths Detection products would need to be tied to the claimed features, not to the general demand for IMS/MS instruments.

9. Bottom line

Caveats / limitations of this analysis (stated rather than inferred):

• I analyzed the issued claims against the prior art listed on the face of the patent, per your instruction. I do not have the actual claim amendments or examiner's stated reasons for allowance from the file history (the legal events show a final rejection on 2020-06-10 and allowance in 2021 after a response-after-final). The novelty-preserving limitations are most likely "pinhole" and "enclosed internal volume … encircling the sampling inlet," and my § 103 case is strongest precisely because those elements are supplied by Spangler and Krasnobaev/Osaka respectively.
• Some references (e.g., US 2015/0300927 A1) have effective filing dates before 2015-09-30 but publication dates after it; I treated them as § 102(a)(2) art on that basis. Confirm the exact priority chain if any reference's status is outcome-determinative.
• Paragraph/figure pin cites above are drawn from the reference abstracts, claims, and specification text I retrieved; for a formal petition or invalidity contention, each passage should be verified against the printed patent copies.

Sources: Google Patents full text for US 11,067,484 B2 (https://patents.google.com/patent/US11067484/en); US 5,355,719 A (https://patents.google.com/patent/[US5355719A](/patent/US5355719A)); US 2004/0227073 A1 / US 6,870,155 B2 (https://patents.google.com/patent/US20040227073A1); US 2012/0080593 A1 (https://patents.google.com/patent/US20120080593); WO 2008/116943 A1; US 2011/0186436 A1; and the NPL citation list on the '484 face (Spangler, NASA 1995).