The motion of mono-disperse spherical steel particles in a vibration driven quasi-two-dimensional （2D） square cell is studied. The cell is horizontally vibrated to eliminate the effect of gravity compaction. The velocity distributions at different particle number densities are studied and found to obey the form exp[-β（｜Vy｜/σy）α], in which Vy and （σy are velocity and its variance in the transverse direction, and α and β are fitting parameters. The value of α is found to decrease with the number density of particles increasing. To investigate the effect of the bottom plate, the molecular dynamics simulation without considering any bottom friction is performed. The accordance between the simulation result and the experimental result shows that the influence of bottom plate friction force on the high energy tail of the velocity distribution can be neglected.
