A spouted bed is used in drying and coating. It involves spraying a liquid into a bed packed with the solid to be coated. A fluidizing gas fed from the bottom of the bed causes a spout, which causes the solids to circle linearly around the liquid. Work has been undertaken to model the minimum velocity of gas required for spouting in a spouted bed, including the use of artificial neural networks. Testing with such models found that Archimedes number is a parameter that has a very large effect on the minimum spouting velocity.