In this work, the scale-up methodology of He et al. (1997) that is based on maintaining similar or close dimensionless groups in gas-solid spouted beds has been evaluated. Two geometrically similar spouted beds of 0.152 m and 0.076 m diameter have been used. It has been demonstrated experimentally, that there is non-similarity in the local hydrodynamic parameters such as solids holdup and dimensionless solids velocity, when all the dimensionless groups have been matched or close to each other in the two studied spouted beds. This confirms that the global hydrodynamic parameters should not be used to confirm the validity of or to evaluate the dimensionless groups scale-up based methodologies. (C) 2017 Published by Elsevier Ltd.