In this study, lactic acid purification using reactive distillation system was evaluated. Factorial experimental design is used to evaluate the influence of parameters and their interactions, such as ethanol/lactic acid molar ratio, reboiler temperature and catalyst concentration on yield of lactate. The results showed that the process for lactic acid purification proposed in this work, provides large potential to achieve high yield of ethyl lactate (-100%) and lactic acid with 3 times higher concentration than the raw material. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.