Based on the literature and our long-term investigations on indoor environment, the heat source patterns (distribution, location, size, etc) have a predominant effect on temperature efficiency as well as ventilation effectiveness. Although the heat sources of ventilated rooms are various and complicated in engineering practices, some typical characteristics still exist in common. From our investigations, basically, heat sources can be classified into three basic models:
1. Heat sources uniformly distributed in the room space;
2. Heat sources uniformly distributed being at various heights above floor level;
3. A concentrated heat source at the base of a room.
On the basis of the theoretical analysis on upward ventilation, the vertical temperature distributions of the various typical heat source patterns can be obtained successively. In addition, with the temperature distributions of basic heat source models individually determined, the vertical temperature distributions of real upward ventilation engineering problems would be solved through their superimposition.