In this design, the weight of the rotating blade is lifted by air. When the blade turns, air pressure between the blade and the base increase to an extend that it lifts the blade, but when that happens, the area increases and therefore the pressure decreases. Eventually, it will float in mid air, approximately 0.3mm away from the base. They called this effect "the air bearing." No grease, lubricant, or thermally conductive bearings.Because they have to thermally couple a spinning impeller to a stationary base. They are going to need some kind of liquid lubricated thermally conductive bearing between the two thermal masses. If such a device were feasible they would be ubiquitous by now. Yet out of a billion air cooling systems around the world, precisely 0.000% of them use non-stationary thermal masses coupled by bearings. Probably because it is cheaper to do liquid cooling at that point. The thermal mass is always decoupled from the moving parts.
Correction, not .3mm, but .03mm. Sorry.
The rotating portion also have a flat bottom surface. So the air bearing acts on 2 flat surfaces, the top surface is rotating, and the bottom is stationary.
The air which acts as air bearing does not come directly from the rotating blade, but are supplied via a different machanic which are generated by the same motor. It was described as follows:
The prototype device is configured as a static (externally pressurized) thrust bearing. In realworld thermal management applications such an externally pressurized air bearing would be replaced by a hydrodynamic (self-pressurizing) air bearing, which uses a minute fraction of the mechanical power supplied by the brushless motor to generate the required lifting force.
Because the rotating blade floats in mid-air, the only physical contact, if there is any, is the nod from the rotor to prevent the rotating blade block to fly away. This design features a motor called a sensorless blushless motor, which means there exist minimal physical contact.
That means, in simple terms, this design only consists of 3 parts, the base, which can be a circular aluminum plate; the rotating blade, which is no harder to make compare to the Intel stock HS (the phototype was made from a single block of aluminum); and the sensorless blushless motor, which is used by lots of cooling fans.
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