I'm sure Steve knows this, but just to be clear for everyone, a junction temperature of 85C is a good design goal. The heatsink surface temperature would be well below that. Conversely, if the heatsink is at 85C, the junction is considerably hotter!
A good point.. I was just worried about getting too far into a separate subject and losing the main subject of discussion.
It does bring up the whole discussion of heatsinks and the potentially loose relationship between heatsink temperature and junction temperature. With a small heatsink and low thermal resistance between the LED and heatsink, the heatsink could be very close to the junction temperature In this case, you wouldn't want to touch the heatsink if the junction temperature was 150C.
On the other end of extremes, the heatsink might be very large, but there might be a large thermal resistance between the LED and the heatsink. In this case, the junction temperature could be 150c and the heatsink temperature could be close to the temperature of the air. The cool temperature of the heatsink could fool you into thinking that the junction temperature was also very low.
A good practice is to measure the temperature of the LED close to where it connects to the circuit board or heatsink or whatever it is mounted to. A thermal imager might be useful too, but I haven't used one and can't speak with any authority.
As a rule of thumb.. I like to have the heatsink be cool enough to touch without thinking that it is really uncomfortable to hold for a length of time. Hmmm... it guess that is literally a rule of thumb.
and let me add the disclaimer that this advice is targeted at the hobbyist, as I'm sure that DIWdiver knows this already.
to go back to the discussion about proper thermal design, the datasheet is a bit vague about what junction temperature is best. They do point the user towards their document titled Cree XLamp Long-Term Lumen Maintenance....
http://www.cree.com/~/media/Files/C...Application Notes/XLamp_lumen_maintenance.pdf
This document goes into great detail about what contributes to loss of light output and what sort of degradation occurs in each part of the LED. Pretty neat stuff (for the tech nerds among us).
Looking through the datasheet, I'm struggling to find where it specifies the L80 life, or any other specific discussion of lifetime. The graph for thermal design on page 8 mentions "optimal life and optical characteristics", but that seems to be the only mention of lifetime.
The datasheet also links to their Thermal Management document....
http://www.cree.com/~/media/Files/C... Application Notes/XLampThermalManagement.pdf
Page 3 references a LM-80 summary for XLamp LEDs, and has a link to a TM-21 Calculator that lets the user calculate the LM-80 lifetime under different conditions.
It's nice that they provide this info, but it seems like they should at list some typical number for the LM-80 lifetime in the datasheet and then direct the user to go through the Thermal Management document for detailed info.
(disclaimer: I'm writing this early in the morning and may have missed some important detail)