Opinion ID: 211242
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Prior Art and Pre-filing Activities

Text: 17 The inventors named in the '414 patent, James M. Crump and Bruce K. Doyle, Jr., were dealers for the A.O. Smith Corporation (A.O.Smith) and sold A.O. Smith's tank agitation system containing a single, center-mounted, rotatable agitator nozzle, known as the Slurrystore system. According to Crump, in 1990 the inventors first became involved with the Slurrystore system when A.O. Smith asked them to help move a tank from a farm to a wastewater treatment plant in Plymouth, Indiana. 18 Commonwealth Engineering, Plymouth's engineering firm, redesigned the tank for use in the wastewater plant by moving the original agitator away from the tank center and adding a second agitator that was placed on the same radial line on the same side of the tank. The first and second agitators were placed at a distance of approximately 25 and 75 percent respectively, from the tank's center to the wall. The nozzles were designed to rotate in position so that the workers could agitate different sections and clean out the tank when needed. According to Crump, this new design did not help the mixing because the tank slurry was still only agitated in zones and not throughout the whole tank. At startup, the Plymouth tank did not operate properly until flow reducers were installed on the nozzles to impart more energy into the liquid volume. LD presented a video tape made in January of 1992 showing that flow occurred in only one section of the Plymouth tank and not the entire tank. 19 In the summer and fall of 1991, Crump and Doyle designed and sold the next relevant tank system to a hog processing plant called Indiana Packers. LD claims the Indiana Packers tank was the same as the Plymouth tank and did not embody the invention claimed by the '414 patent. Crump's diagrams and testimony suggest that the Indiana Packers tank was similar in layout to Plymouth and, like Plymouth, only mixed the liquid in zones. 20 In April of 1991, the inventors submitted a proposal to A.O. Smith asking that a patent application be filed for their invention for zone mixing within the Indiana Packers and Plymouth tanks. A.O. Smith declined to develop the proposal because it appeared that the invention, as described, was not patentable. Crump testified that in February of 1992, he and Doyle began to develop the idea for mixing throughout the entire tank volume instead of just mixing in one zone at a time, as the Plymouth and Indiana Packers designs provided. The '414 patent, incorporating the concept of volume-filling flow, was filed on May 7, 1992. Although the original application did not claim a substantially helical flow path, it was later amended to claim such a flow path. 21 Crump further testified that on May 20, 1991 he offered to sell another system for antibiotic industrial waste to Eli Lilly just after the critical date. According to Crump, the Eli Lilly system was not only offered after the critical date, its nozzle placement was not even within the limitations of the patent. At the time the patent was filed, the Plymouth, Indiana Packers, and Eli Lilly tanks had been installed.