The high-rise shaft, including the stairwell and elevator shaft, is an essential part of modern buildings. However, driven by stack effect, smoke often spreads across a building through shafts, which become a major challenge for high-rise fire protections. It is therefore important to conduct research on the smoke movement inside high-rise shafts, for which scale modeling based on experiments in sub-scale models of full-size buildings is an important technique. Froude modeling method is probably the most common approach to designing sub-scaled experiments. However previous studies found that Froude modeling does not consider heat transfer adequately and thus provide inaccurate temperature predictions, especially for when there exists significant heat transfer between smoke and surrounding walls. In this paper, a new scale modeling method is developed based on a group of new dimensionless numbers derived from the conservations of both heat transfer and mechanical energy for natural venting systems of high-rise shafts. To verify the new modeling method, sub-scaled experiments were conducted in two shafts with different sizes and materials using both Froude and the new modeling methods. The results of temperature profiles, relative neutral plane levels and mass flow rates, are compared for both methods. It was found that the new modeling method provides more accurate results.