Accepted Article Reactive Extraction of Acrylic Acid with Tri-n-Butyl Phosphate in Natural Oils Aparajita Kar, Ashwini Bagde, Kanti Kumar Athankar*, Kailas L. Wasewar, Diwakar Z. Shende Advance Separation and Analytical Laboratory (ASAL), Chemical Engineering Department, Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology (VNIT), Nagpur, Maharashtra 440010, India *Corresponding Author Email: kanti.kumar@rediffmail.com Telephone: +91-712-2801580, Fax: +91-712-2801565 Abstract Background Acrylic acid has an ample range of application in plastic additives, textiles, sealants, adhesives, and surface coatings industries. Owing to its multifarious demand, production through biotechnological method has emerged as low-cost, energy-efficient, environment friendly with few challenges at downstream stage. Reactive extraction is a promising method to recover carboxylic acid, but suffers from toxicity problems of the diluent and extractant employed. Therefore, there is a need for a nontoxic extractant and diluent or a combination of less toxic extractants in a nontoxic diluent that can recover acid efficiently. In this context, This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. This article has been accepted for publication and undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may lead to differences between this version and the Version of Record. Please cite this article as doi: 10.1002/jctb.5295