Bed stability, and especially the bed density distribution, is affected by the behavior of bubbles in a gas solid fluidized bed. Bubble rise velocity in a pulsed gas–solid fluidized bed was studied using photographic and computational fluid dynamics methods. The variation in bubble rise velocity was investigated as a function of the periodic pulsed air flow. A predictive model of bubble rise velocity was derived:u_b=wðUt þ Up  UmfÞ þ kpffigffiffidffiffiffiffiffi b . The software of Origin was used to fit the empirical coefficients to give w = 0.4807 and kp = 0.1305. Experimental verification of the simulations shows that the regular change in bubble rise velocity is accurately described by the model. The correlation coefficient was 0.9905 for the simulations and 0.9706 for the experiments.