As the scale of residual oil treatment increases and cleaner production improves in China, slurry bubble column reactors face many challenges and opportunities for residual oil hydrogenation technology. The internals devel-opment is critical to adapt the long-term stable operation. In this paper, the volumetric mass transfer coefficient, gas holdup and bubble size in a gas-liquid up-flow column are studied with two kinds of internals. The gas holdup and volumetric mass transfer coefficient increase by 120%and 42%when the fractal dimension of bubbles increases from 0.56 to 2.56, respectively. The enhanced mass transfer processing may improve the coke suppres-sion ability in the slurry reactor for residual oil treatment. The results can be useful for the exploration of reacting conditions, scale-up strategies, and oil adaptability. This work is valuable for the design of reactor systems and technological processes.