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I had heard of some passive cooling methods that were in the pipeline but I never saw any details. I suspect they were a bit pie in the sky. Supposedly methods of moving air involving no moving parts
I don't see any reason why heat pipe tech could not be used to help cool LED lights. It is in common use to cool high heat components on PC motherboards and has been for years. It would help out in in home lighting where retrofit lamps are generally placed somewhere quite hot (Recessed lighting) so your heat sink ends up in a hot area. Better to put the heat sink somewhere cooler and pipe the heat off the junction to there instead. Complete replacement downlights do not suffer that problem though as the heat sink ends up in your roof space. I am not sold on downlights in any form as such due to all the holes you have to punch in your ceiling insulation to fit them. Terribly uncool but I see no great advantage over an LED lamp in a GLS form.
Regards operating temperature or ambient, I am sure that the hotter it is the worse it is regardless of operation but to my understanding operating temperature is far more critical.
I am going down the path of converting things to LED in the home, we are slowly getting there, the problem is that most of our lighting is fluorescent, the hardest type to justify changing over if it is still serviceable.
I want to re light my whole shed and it will cost thousands to do it in LED just in the luminaires versus hundreds to replace the old fluoro assemblies with new ones. The power consumption difference is marginal enough that if I am honest, LED will never pay for itself. I would save more by getting the sparky to rearrange the wiring so I can switch them more intelligently to light only my work area of the time rather than half of a 26 X 75 foot shed when I just want to go work in one corner.
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