Abstract Hydrodynamics of gas-solid fluidized bed was investigated by analyzing its pressure fluctuations using cross recurrence quantification analysis (CRQA). Pressure fluctuations were measured in a lab scale fluidized bed of various particle sizes at different gas velocities. First, the CRQA was applied to a number of well-known dynamic systems and the results demonstrated that it is a powerful method to detect similarities between nonlinear signals. Then, it was shown that graphical structures within the cross recurrence plot of pressure fluctuations of a fluidized bed vary with both superficial gas velocity and particle size. It was found that determinism and cross recurrence rate of non-normalized data initially decrease and then increase with increasing the gas velocity. When the signal is initially normalized, determinism and entropy do not change with the superficial gas velocity while cross recurrence rate is sensible to changes in the superficial gas velocity. It was concluded that entropy can be used for detecting changes of particle size and if a proper reference state is chosen, entropy can be a powerful index for detecting changes in the size of particles in a fluidized bed.