Thanks for coming out swinging. Read the whitepaper, because a quick skim has already shown me several errors in your logic.
I reject your premise that there will be inherently more friction than in a fan motor. I also reject the premise that the air gap in this device is exactly the same as a static air gap. The gap is there so air under pressure can be injected into the gap as an air bearing. Air is significantly less viscous than oil in a ball or sleeve bearing so despite the larger bearing surface it is not immediately obvious which has less friction. That would depend on the size of the air gap the pressure of the incoming air versus the clearance of the sleeve bearing, size of the ball bearings, viscosity of the lubricant, etc. And while I feel it is counterintuitive that air would be a good conductor it would be under pressure and in dynamic flow both because new air is being injected to force it out and because of the shear forces of the surfaces it is squeezed between. So it isn't exactly the same as your typical static TIM situation and would need to be measured.
Speaking of measured they state right in the whitepaper the performance measurements of the prototype device:
Sounds decent for something that's 100% bad. As for replacing parts while the computer is still operating, I don't see why that would be a problem. The motor is accessible right on the top.For example, a survey of commercial CPU coolers indicates that a conventional fan-plus-
heat-sink device equal in size to the version 1 prototype device in Figure 6 has a typical
thermal resistance of 0.6 to 0.8 C/W. Our version 1 prototype device on the other hand has a
measured thermal resistance of 0.2 C/W. This represents a huge advance in a field that has
long seen only incremental progress in cooling performance. Moreover, as discussed later,
we have reason to believe that a 2nd
generation prototype could readily achieve a thermal
resistance of <=0.1 C/W in a device of the same size.
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