: Despite the importance and wide applications of liquid-liquid extraction in petroleum, pharmaceutical, and chemical industries, there have been limited attempts to use nanofluids in such processes. In the present study the effect of hydrophilic silica nanoparticles on mass transfer and hydrodynamics of liquid-liquid extraction was experimentally investigated. A vertical pipe 75 cm long and 7.9 cm in diameter was used as the contactor. Single drop experiments with a range of nozzle diameters within 0.1-0.51 cm were carried out. Experiments were divided into two sections in which drops were injected to the continuous phase from the bottom and top of the column. The ternary chemical system of toluene-acetic acid-water has been used. For the first section of the experiments, SiO 2 with volume concentrations of 0.005-0.1% were added to the continuous aqueous phase and organic drops rising through this phase. In the second section, nanoparticles with 0.005-0.5% were added to aqueous dispersed phase settling through the organic continuous phase. Mass transfer direction was considered from dispersed to continuous phase for both sets of experiments. Potentiometric titration was employed for determining final concentrations of solute in dispersed phases. In order to visualize geometrical shapes and determining size of the drops, captured photos using a digital camera were analyzed by graphical softwares Adobe Photoshop 7.0 and ImageJ 1.47v. Results indicated that in the presence of nanoparticles in the continuous phase and by adding its content up to 0.1 vol. %, overall mass transfer coefficient deteriorated with an average value of 19%. The negative impact of increasing nanoparticle content can be attributed to increase in viscosity of continuous phase which causes reduction of mass diffusivity and also nanoparicle hindrance effect which may cover the liquid-liquid interface and thus reducing of mass transfer. Also by adding nanoparticles to the dispersed phase, overall mass transfer coefficients decreased with nanoparticle volume fractions up to 0.05% with an average decrease of 17%. This observation can be due to hindrance effect of fine particles and for more nanoparticle concentrations this effect overshadowed by stronger impact of disturbance field induced by Brownian motion of silica nanoparticles. The experimental observations revealed that nanoparticle presence appears to have no significant impact on hydrodynamic parameters of rising or settling droplets including terminal velocity, geometrical shape and mean drop size, for both conditions of adding nanoparticles to dispersed and continuous phases. Keywords: liquid-liquid extraction; nanofluid; overall mass transfer coefficient; hydrodynamic behavior; single drop experiment