Medium mover
With advanced atomically precise manufacturing capabilities one can construct materials which act as pumps and fans that seem to have no moving parts and are only acustically perceivable when something is hold into the (designed to be laminar) airstream making it turbulent.
Contents
Miniaturized Fans
Including arrays of micro sized fans into a sheet of in-plane-flexible but not stretchable metamaterial is called a fancloth (a concept devised by J. Storrs Hall). Its a bit like an active sail.
Facilitating capsule transport
Air accelerators: One possibility may be to capture air (or any gas) or droplets of liquid at the entrance completely (not partially like in the following moving surfaces case) and use capsule transport to move and maybe accelerate this batch and release it at the outlet side. When dealing with gasses one must take care. One can unintentionally build a heat pump (volume changes need to be avoided).
Moving Surfaces for immersed ships
This is for airplanes (and submarines?).
Also from J. Storrs Hall is the concept of wheels turning on the surfaces (flat moving surfaces might work even better) to reduce aerodynamic drag to the negative regieme. High speeds need either infinitesimal bearings or special levitated bearings that can deal with the pressure (possible?).
What essentially happens here is inside out capsule transport. One replaces aerodynamic drag with the way lower superlubrication drag. Except for the displacement at the front and back the air "thinks" the plane is standing. Very little power need to be put into the active surfaces to keep the current speed.
High speed flight limit
Things get interesting when the speed of sound gets approached. Its like a nano-turbomolecular-pump running at ambient air pressure (but with pre accelerated molecules). [Todo: How much analysis is present?]
The snout and heck have to be very tight turnaround points. There things get most problematic. Cooling the edges with via capsule transport (thermal energy transmission) might be possible giving the vessel interesting shape that is a round thinn blade at the front due to the necessary high trunaround radius.
Related
Terminology
Moving surfaces are rather dissimilar to pumps and fans or even jet engines thus the more general title medium movers was choosen for this topic.
