Several recent studies have shown that numerical methods originally developed for simulating gas-liquid flow can be extended to simulate the hydrodynamics of gas-solid flow in gas-fluidized beds, thanks to the similarity between gas-liquid and gas-solid flows. In this study, the volume of fluid method which is widely used in the direct numerical simulations of gas-liquid systems, is used to study the bubbling dynamics in a dense gas-solid jetting fluidized bed. It was shown that the bubble dynamics in a gas-solid fluidized bed, including the bubble growth rate, the time-averaged porosity profiles at two different profiles and the time-averaged global porosity distribution, can be reproduced reasonably well. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.