Pulverized fuel (PF) burners play a key role for the performance of PF fired gasification and combustion plants, by minimizing pollutant emission, fuel. consumption and hence fuel costs. However, fuel diversity in power generation plants imposes limitations on the performance of existing PF burners, especially when burning solid fuel particles with poor flowability like biomass sawdust. In the present study, a vertically downward laminar flow was laden with biomass particles at different particle mass loading ratios, ranging from 0.47 to 2.67. The particle laden flow was forced by a synthetic jet actuator over a range of forcing amplitudes, 0.35-1.1 kPa. Pulverized pine particles with a sieve size range of 63-112 mu m were used as biomass feedstock. Two-phase particle image velocimetry was applied to measure the velocity of the particles and air flow at the same time. The results showed that the synthetic jet had a large influence on the flow fields of both air and powdered pipe particles, via a convective effect induced by vortex rings that propagate in the flow direction. The particle velocity, particle dispersion and hence inter-particle distance increased with increasing forcing amplitude. Moreover, particles accumulated within a specific region of the flow, based on their size. The effect on particle dispersion was more pronounced in the forced flows with low mass loading ratios. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.