Mechanism, influencing factors exploration and modelling on the reactive extraction of 2-ketogluconic acid in presence of a phase modifier

•Analysis of 2-ketogluconic acid reactive extraction with Amberlite LA2 and octanol.•Correlation of extraction mechanism and influencing factors in three solvents.•Complex stoichiometry 2-ketogluconic acid:extractant was 1:1 regardless of the solvent.•1-Octanol addition in all solvents improved extraction yield. Taking into account that limited research has been carried out on the reactive extraction of 2-ketogluconic acid, this study was focused on analyzing the pH dependent extraction performance and the molar ratios of acid and extractant (Amberlite LA-2) dissolved in three solvents with 1-octanol as phase modifier. Back extraction was successfully performed using NaOH solutions. The mechanism of the interfacial reaction in the presence of 1-octanol, pointed out that, indifferent of the pH value and solvent polarity, only one molecule of 2-ketogluconic acid and one of extractant react at the interface. The positive effect of 1-octanol on extraction efficiency was quantified by means of the amplification factor, its maximum values being 2.43 for dichloromethane, 3.67 for butyl acetate and 3.64 for n-heptane. In addition, the process was modelled using statistical regression and Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) determined with chaos based Differential Evolution algorithm. The best ANN model had a mean squared error for the testing phase of 0.19 and modeled the process with an acceptable error.