Unlocking Potential: Vegetable Oil Effects on Lactic Acid Extraction

ABSTRACT The objective of this study was to recover lactic acid (LA) from aqueous solutions using a reactive extraction method with tri‐ n ‐octylamine (TOA) and vegetable‐origin oils, including sunflower, corn, sesame, rice bran, olive, almond, palm, and canola oils as solvents. In physical extraction, sunflower oil gave the highest yield at 10.9 %, whereas reactive extraction followed a different trend. The maximum separation efficiency of 74.54 % was obtained when rice bran oil was used as the solvent at a TOA concentration of 3.61 mol kg −1 . Distribution coefficient also reached its highest value ( K D = 2.93) with rice bran oil as a solvent. It was found that the loading factors of the samples were inversely proportional to the increasing concentration of the reactant in the reactive extraction process. Principal component analysis shows that two components explain 93.5 % of the variance. Sesame oil and rice bran oil had the highest similarity (98.94 %) and were the closest group in the dendrogram.