Other side coefficients Honeybee

chris · February 11, 2026, 7:02pm

Technically speaking, assigning a schedule of temperature values is far easier to do by post-processing the OSM output from the “Model To OSM” component using the OpenStudio SDK like what you see here.

So you could set up your honeybee model using the regular-old “Other Side Temperature” boundary conditions and then make a component that takes the resulting OSM, adds your various schedules for temperatures, and then post-processes the other side boundary conditions already in the OSM to use these schedules.

You can see here in the honeybee-openstudio source code that the “Other Side Coefficient” objects get named using the identifier of the parent Face (just with _OtherTemp added to it):

github.com

ladybug-tools/honeybee-openstudio/blob/master/honeybee_openstudio/writer.py#L354


      
              os_face.setOutsideBoundaryCondition(fbc.name)
          if isinstance(fbc, Outdoors):
              if not fbc.sun_exposure:
                  os_face.setSunExposure('NoSun')
              if not fbc.wind_exposure:
                  os_face.setWindExposure('NoWind')
              if fbc.view_factor != autocalculate:
                  os_face.setViewFactortoGround(fbc.view_factor)
          elif isinstance(fbc, OtherSideTemperature):
              srf_prop = OSSurfacePropertyOtherSideCoefficients(os_model)
              srf_prop.setName('{}_OtherTemp'.format(face.identifier))
              htc = fbc.heat_transfer_coefficient
              srf_prop.setCombinedConvectiveRadiativeFilmCoefficient(htc)
              if fbc.temperature == autocalculate:
                  srf_prop.setConstantTemperatureCoefficient(0)
                  srf_prop.setExternalDryBulbTemperatureCoefficient(1)
              else:
                  srf_prop.setConstantTemperature(fbc.temperature)
                  srf_prop.setConstantTemperatureCoefficient(1)
                  srf_prop.setExternalDryBulbTemperatureCoefficient(0)
              os_face.setSurfacePropertyOtherSideCoefficients(srf_prop)

So you can use this to match specific “Other Side Coefficient” objects to their corresponding schedule if you have one schedule-per-face or something like that.

If you try doing this on your own and you hit a road block, let me know and I can help you out if you provide me with a sample .gh file with your temperature schedules and corresponding geometry in it.

But I’m pretty confident that changing honeybee-schema for this purpose is not worthwhile at the moment. It just makes too much of a mess of the honeybee source code and also makes it more complicated for other software developers to use honeybee-schema while only addressing a small fraction of simulation use cases. Or, maybe a better way to put it is that the people with these types of simulation use cases (like yourself and others running OpenFOAM simulations) are usually advanced enough to try alternative strategies for getting the E+ simulation the way that you want (like editing things via the OpenStudio SDK). So I want to make sure that we have thoroughly tried the alternatives before considering schema changes.