When disassembling the Librem 5 there is a plastic cover in the upper half, hiding the modem and the WiFi adapter.
Now imagine we would drill multiple holes into this plastic cover. Would heat management profit from these holes? Another benefit would be a reduction in weight but of course that’s minor.
This might help in evaluation and discussion:
In short, NOT will help.
First you need undestands why is heating if so why it the benefits of heating compared to PPs.
Thank you for answering. 
I am not sure if I understand you correctly.
I don’t say that the Librem 5 is (too) hot in general. I just remember that heat management is or has been a challenge. And I had the idea with the holes. I do not expect that the holes will magically resolve this challenge. I can’t actually judge. I am no physicist nor an electrical engineer. I don’t even have the phone, yet.
Anyway it would be a simple, cheap measure which perhaps may help to optimize heat management. And I am curios. That’s why I simply posted here as a question.
Well I would say that conventional electronics are inefficient in that not all energy put in is getting used for their intended purpose but waste some of this energy as heat radiation. The amount of heat depends on some parameters. Let’s put the modularity of the Librem 5’s hardware aside for a moment then the hardware could considered to be static and thus the generated heat depends on the usage of the device. Some activities e.g. charging or massive calculation workload raise heat generation. I don’t know how much the battery can warm up but I would say the CPU is the biggest heat generator. IIRC the CPU has been placed directly under the display (at some revision) which seems to help getting the heat dissipation.
Please correct me if I am wrong.
Directly under the plastic cover there is the WiFi adapter and the modem located, correct? How hot can these parts get?
Phosh & ecosystem still need to be more optimized to use less cpu, this will improve dramatically the heating and battery on L5, so i guess this features will happen on Purism_Pure OS Octarine or Byzantium backporting. Be patient that the good is yet to come.
The high heat sensitivity of the L5 is by design, but this design helps to SINK heat faster and make the cpu run faster, otherwise the cpu would reach a high temperature and the cpu would run slow. The L5 monitor(screen) is designed to support high temperatures as well too.
It true. It is a big cpu for mobile.
Evergreen has the cpu on front to monitor.
The modem not much heat, but with open firmware the modem will more cooler and battery save.
You most right
Someone should design a micro-fan! (Or a series of them for intake and egress.)
I am confident that you respective Purism took well care of the design in respect of heat management. I just wondered if there was still some improvement possible. If you say that holes in the plastic cover doesn’t improve the heat management that’s okay for me, I trust you.
BTW I’ve read here and there about … I think it was called thermoelectric materials or something similar, meaning materials that generate electricity out of heat or differences in temperature. Imagine a phone that recycles the heat to charge it’s battery. Or laptops and desktop computers as well as data centers without van cooling but reduced energy consumption. Research on those materials is going on for decades but I have no clue when we will see those stuff in application on computer systems. Until then we could use a Stirling motor to run a cooling van. 
That’s just a side note, which came to my mind thinking about this topic.
Update:
There is research going on on thermoelectronic cooling (TEC) directly inside computer chips.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1018363918310936
And there are liquid cooling systems with TEC although I am not sure that they use those materials that I’ve read about. It’s to long ago. I remember only half of the stuff.
That may compromise anti-interdiction although I guess it is technically OK provided that you are the one to drill the holes after you receive your device.
The L5 uses metal shields over the chips and thermal paste to dissipate heat through the aluminum frame and the metal back of the LCD, which is why the sides and screen of the L5 gets hot. (One of the benefits of adding a case is that your hand doesn’t have to touch the metal sides of the phone when it gets hot.) I doubt that just drilling holes in the case will do much to effect the temperature, but I look forward to hearing about any tests that you do.
If you added a tiny fan to suck out air and drilled holes in the case so air is pulled from the outside and over the surface of the PCB, I think that would cool the L5, but it would also shorten the battery life.
In my tests, the L5’s processor was limited to a max temperature of 50C, which is 10C cooler than the max temperature of the PinePhone, but you feel the heat a lot more in the L5 because your hand touches the metal sides and LCD, whereas you can avoid touching the upper back section where the PInePhone gets hot.
Well Purism it going to perform a smart hack into the kernel to slow down the heat of L5, so not need to do dirty hack on L5 like holes on backside for sure, just not make sense do dirty hack on hardware when it has a solution on software. Moreover GTK4 Librem 5 ecosytem will help to slow down the heat too.
I really recommend to Purism put a heavy focus on Librem 5 Fir hardware desing, to be success on all the areas like enhance Heats, Size, Silicon Bugs, ETC,ETC because this last time to putting L5 the best gnu mobile phone on the world. I wish Purism the best.
Note: The whole frame metal need to reduced 60% and the 40% putting just on Top on the phone, in this way the user can not feel the heat metal. Or split 50% on Top and Bottom. Or why not a mini fan inside to reduce the heat from core and just enabled on Convergence Mode? 
Just tape an ice cream bar to the back of it…functional and tasty!
dos 
