The behavior of the particulate phase in a highly turbulent gas flow has been investigated in a vertical channel. Variations of the flow configuration (1. Flow past a cylinder, 2. flow past a wall-mounted obstacle and 3. flow around a horizontally injected jet) have been subject to both experiments and numerical simulations. The velocity vector field of the solid phase has been measured by digital particle image velocimetry (DPIV). The measurements have been focused on particle-obstacle collisions and crossflow in the vicinity of the jet nozzle using the lately developed twinpeak detection method. By application of this method regions of highly inhomogeneous particle behavior could be detected mainly upstream of the flow perturbation. Numerical results have been obtained by an Eulerian-Lagrangian method on boundary-fitted grids. Particle-particle interactions as well as interphase exchange of momentum have been taken into account. The simulation results showed to be well in accordance with the experimental results.