1 IJEIT, Special issue for The international Eng. Conf. IECMU2021 , VOL.9,NO.

1, December 2021

Experimental Study on the Addition of Date

palm Fibers as a Reinforcement in Gypsum
Mortar
H. Aljewifi A. Edriss A. Mohamed H. Farhat
Omar Al Mukhtar University Omar Al Mukhtar University Omar Al Mukhtar University Omar Al Mukhtar University

Abstract— Libya is considered one of the major Arab density, which gives relatively light composites with high
countries in the cultivation of palm trees, as it holds the fifth specific characteristics.
place in the Arab world in the number of palm trees with Natural fibers also offer significant cost advantages
about 8 million of them planted on estimated area of 70 and associated processing advantages, compared to
thousand hectares. The present paper aims to characterize
synthetic fibers. The amounts of cellulose and
date-palm fiber-reinforced gypsum mortar, where different
percentages of palm fibers were added by substituting with hemicelluloses in date palm are lower in other natural
various percentages of gypsum weight. Untreated date palm fibers. As a result, the date palm has a significant amount
fibers have been used after extraction process from date tree of lignin compared to other natural fibers [1]. Usually a
as (leaf, root, sheath, trunk…). Physical properties of fibers plant fiber is physically characterized by its diameter,
have been measured as volumetric density, coefficient of density, water content and percentage of water
absorption and water content. Natural date palm fibers absorption. It is characterized mechanically by its rupture
have been used without treatment. For mortar cured up to tensile strength and by the modulus of elasticity [2].
28 days, its composition which report W/G = 0.6. The Mahdi et al., 2015, [3] approved that the date palm leaf
present work consists of studying the effect of gypsum
fiber (DPLF) showed high hydrophilic behavior and
mortar reinforcing with different types of date palm fibers,
with different lengths (0.53-19 cm) and different reached saturation (98.4%) within 24 hours. Natural
percentages (0-6%) on compression behavior in the Fibers have biodegradable characteristics; the alkali
hardened state. Cubic specimens' compressive strength was environment of the cement matrix leads to durability
(7x7x7 cm), are removed after 24 hours and then conserved problems in the fibers. This will eventually cause
in dry air at 28 days for mechanical testing. The mechanical reduction in fiber strength and toughness if these fibers
property of composites such as compressive strength of were not treated to resist the effect of alkali attack.
natural fiber composite was reported and compare with the Moreover, weak bond interface between natural fibers
data for control mix. It has been seen form compression test and cement matrix reduces the influence of fibers to
that palm composite has never been higher compressive
strength than the control mix.
improve the performance of the new composite [4].
Today, of researches development, it is possible to
Index Terms: natural date palm fibers, gypsum mortar, obtain extremely resistant materials from a fiber and a
physical and mechanical properties of fibers, compression fragile elastic matrix. Gypsum has a behavior defined as
test. brittle elastic, that is to say that its failure occurs for
relatively small deformations, and it also causes fairly
I. INTRODUCTION extensive cracks. Gypsum is also hygroscopic, meaning it
is susceptible to absorbing moisture, which is

T he natural fibers have always played a central role in

civilization development since they possess optimal
properties. Many scientific researches have shown the
accompanied by expansion. Conversely, any departure of
water induces a removal of the gypsum mass. Either
phenomenon occurs depending on the relative humidity
advantages of using natural fibers in composite materials. and temperature of the atmosphere, which vary greatly
As specific fibers that are selected and introduced into over the course of a year. These repetitive cycles of
building materials can improve their properties and swelling and shrinkage induce very strong internal
reduce the total cost of construction or add them as a stresses in a partition, which causes spontaneous
partial substitute for one of the components of concrete cracking. It is on this characteristic that the bibliographic
and thus can also support the use of sustainable materials. collection on gypsum is most lacking, probably because
Natural fibers have many interesting properties as the problems relating to setting are more sensitive on a
reinforcement by the composite. Such as being low cement; the setting time scales are in fact
‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ disproportionate, the setting time of the plaster being
Received 21 May , 2021; revised 18 June, 2021; accepted 4 July, 2021. measured in tens of minutes, that of the cement in days.
In order to improve the natural fiber-gypsum composite
Available online 16 Aug, 2021.

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H. Aljewifi, A. Edriss, A. Mohamed and H. Farhat/ Experimental Study on the Addition of Date palm Fibers 2

durability, chemical treatments with sodium hypochlorite B. Date palm fibers

and resin coating were carried out to decrease surface The tree stem in the date palm is surrounded by the
tension and improve adhesion with the matrix. Gallala et mesh made from single fiber. Labib, 2019 [10] explained
al., 2020, [5] concluded that the biocomposite showed that the fiber is used for the creation of different
satisfactory physical, thermal, and mechanical diameters from the natural crossed fibers woven mat.
performances, which qualify it as a thermal insulation Based on the traditional practices, the annual removal of
building material. By incorporating plant fibers into it, a the mat from the trees takes place for the removal of the
modification of this behavior is generally observed [6]. ropes. The date palm contains a fibrous structure,
Gallala et al., 2019 [7] thoroughly discusses date palm containing four types of fibers as classified in [11]: 1-
fibers, including fiber resources, the properties and wood trunk fibers; 2- leaf fibers in the legs; 3- the leg
treatments required to develop palm fiber-supported fibers are at the level of the leg; 4.the superficial fibers
gypsum concrete. Gypsum concrete supported by date around the trunk or at the kernaf. However, fibrous
palm fibers was prepared with variable proportions of materials between the kernaf and the trunk so called leaf.
palm fibers with a ratio of W / G constant of 0.65, and Using of leaf fiber with concrete has a significant
then he made standard molds for testing. As the results, improvement in compressive strength. The best fiber
for the physical properties, increasing the percentage of content was 0.8% and 1% of treated and untreated leaf
fiber from 7 to 20% in gypsum concrete, it increased fiber respectively [12]. A fruitful date palm known as Al
water absorption. This behavior is attributed to the fiber's Bekrari was brought from the eastern coast of Libya, in
porosity and its aqueous character which is mainly due to order to perform all laboratory tests on it. The preparation
the presence of hemicelluloses. was made by first cutting the date palm tree with an
In the construction sector the uses of natural fibers- electric saw into small pieces to facilitate the extraction
gypsum composites are very limited; however they of the fibers from it, see Figure. 1. Then the fibers were
possess attractive properties compared to synthetic fibers- separated manually as indicated in Figure. 2 or by using
based cement composites. The valorization of this natural sieve analysis to make sure it is free from any impurities
fiber and gypsum matrix in the development of the and the fibers are assured to be loosen and prepared to be
construction sector has several objectives: economic, cut into required length for experimental study.
technical and environmental. Furthermore, many gypsum
manufactures are installed because the produced gypsum C. Type of fibers
is mainly used for decorative purposes, although it has Different types of date palm fibers could be obtained
interesting thermal properties [8]. Previous studies show after extraction process as shown in Table 1. Since such
the need to interpret and expand the results of gypsum fibers should have approximately the same geometrics for
compounds and highlight areas that have not yet been the use in the experimental program, it is reasonable to
developed and covered, because the commercial generalize the similar physical properties to the same type
production of date palm compounds is still in its infancy, of fibers. All fibers have been dried at 50°C for 2 days
and more efforts should be made to improve formulations (stability of weight with time). Moreover, diameter’s (D)
and processing standards. 0.15 mm and length’s (L) 11.4 cm of leaf root; D = 1mm,
In this paper, The performance of gypsum L = 1.3 cm of trunk fibers; D = 0.36 mm, L = 19 cm of
mortar reinforced with varying percentages and types of leaf. Physical properties have been studied using water
untreated date palm fibers is investigated to evaluate content and coefficient of absorption test. Their values
their feasibility for structural applications. Natural have varied between (25-122%) and (43-348%)
untreated date palm fiber properties are determined by respectively, see Table 2. Apparent dry density (1.5-1.9
the physical, mechanical properties. However, the g/cm3) and apparent wet density is 2g/cm3 of trunk leaf,
effectiveness of palm fibers in improving gypsum for other fibers detailed in [11]. In addition, mechanical
concrete resistance will be tested, in order to obtain property has effected by tensile test according to ASTM
environmentally friendly concrete and have no harm to D 3822-07 using SM100 Universal material testing
humans, environment. This work concludes that is machine capacity 100 kN (10 ton). The general properties
efficiency of using untreated natural fibers reinforced of fibers are represented as the high tensile strength in the
gypsum composite in dry climate and the palm fibers can bundles made of long fiber. The difference in cross
be used for the manufacture of reinforced mortars, but it section and type of the fiber plays a major role on the
requires controlling their preparation. deformation of the samples. Maximum tensile strength of
3 cm length samples was 3.54 MPa as shown in Table 3,
II. MATERIALS more detailed in [11].

A. Gypsum
The water-gypsum ratio (W/G) in the mixing process
can vary from 0.6 to 0.8 or higher [9]. The gypsum
(CaSO4, 2H2O) used in this work is produced by Egypte
(Egyptian gypsum code, EGS3C491C015). It is mixed
with water, using a water-gypsum plaster of 0.6 by mass.
It has been found that this gypsum mortar has a density of Figure 1. Palm date tree after cutting with an electric saw.
1.2 g/cm3 and corresponding to a maximum compressive
strength of 11 MPa.

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3 IJEIT, Special issue for The international Eng. Conf. IECMU2021 , VOL.9,NO. 1, December 2021
III. SPECIMENS PREPARATION

A. Control mix
The control mix grade 15 was used in this study. A
mortar has been prepared as indicated in Table 4. The
dimension of reference matrix (control mix, Ref G) is
Figure 2. Palm date tree before (left) and after (right) crumbling. 7x7x7 cm. The mixing process is effectued out by
introducing the dry gypsum first in electrically mixer at a
Table 1. Dimensions of different types of date palm fibers. slow speed for a two minutes, then adding the mixing
Diameter Length water and being at a higher speed for one minute, then
Type of leafs Form of fibers
cm cm
pouring the mixture into the mold and test specimens are
removed after 24 hours and then conserved in dry air for
Date palm root 0.15 11.4
28 days at T = 30- 35 °C for mechanical testing.
B. Date palm fibers reinforced mortar
Date palm tree
1 1.3 Date palm fiber was added in the gypsum mortar by the
trunk
subtraction of gypsum weight of (0 – 6) % as indicated in
Table 5.
- Calculation of fiber and matrix mass in composites
Leaf 0.36 19

According to [14] we can apply the following

equations:
Root hydrated -----* 6.3
(1)
(2)
(3)
Leaf mixed with
-----* 8.6
trunk Where:
ρc, , ρf and ρm : are respectivly composite density, fibers
density and mortar density.
Fibers remaining
0.6mm 0.53
mf and mm : are respectivly the weight of fiber and matrix
on a sieve 0.6mm (water with gypsum).
φf : is the used mass fracion.
The mixing process is carried out by mixing the dry
Fibers remaining gypsum first with choosing short fiber at low speed
1mm 0.72
on a sieve 1mm
during two minutes in electric mixer. Mixing water is
added with increasing the speed for one minute. But
Fibers remaining when long fibers are choosen they are mixed with dry
on a sieve 2.36 2.36mm 1.21 gypsum first with low speed for two minutes then mixing
mm water is added with increasing the speed for one minute,
* (----): unmeasured data due to geometry of fibers.
but the long fiber was added manually for 30 sec. As a
result, using the electric mixer lead to the long fiber
Table 2. Absorption coefficient and water content of different types of wrapped around the paddle, and mortar is deposited in the
palm fibers [11]. mixing bowl after adding water. The effect of fiber length
Leaf
Type
Root Trunk Sheath mixed 0.3 0.6 1 2.36
on the consistency of mortar is one of the important
of Leaf parameters because long fibers lead to obtain
leaf leaf leaf with mm mm mm mm
fibers
trunk heterogeneous composite with difficulties of molding
W
25 30 18 39 40 35 21 28 122 with decreasing the consistency than short fibers. It is
(%) important to note that when the long fibers are introduced
C
(%)
143 209 132 137 195 178 348 152 43 into mortar as, so, it is difficult to obtain homogeneous
samples as well as these fibers require large molds, and
Table 3. Mechanical properties of natural date palm fibers [11]. vice versa.
Type of D L F ε A 𝜎 E
- Curing test specimens
fibers cm cm N mm/mm mm² MPa MPa
After casting, the samples were left for 24h, then it is
Fibers of
root
0.6 3 100 0.066 28.27 3.54 54.00 removed out from mold and cured in dry air for 28 days;
temperature was between 30-35°C. Cubes specimens
D. Water (7x7x7 cm) were used. The dimension of the mold
In this research, ordinary tap water was used for all depends on % of fibers and their length that has been
the mixes to prepare fresh gypsum mortar. introduced. For this reason, we selected the diameter of
fibers which coincide with dimension of mold. So Figure.
3 is shown an example of two samples after casting.
Homogenization specimens surface depending on the
percentage and diameter of fibers, see Figure. 4.

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H. Aljewifi, A. Edriss, A. Mohamed and H. Farhat/ Experimental Study on the Addition of Date palm Fibers 4

Table 4. Composition of gypsum mortar (g) gypsum mortar reinforced by leaf of root with different
W (g) G (g) W/G percent ages (0.4-2.5%), their volumetric weight is
between 1.1- 1.34 g/cm3, all values are mentioned in
600 1000 0.6 Table 6.
- Effect the percentage of fibers on apparent
volumetric weight
Figure. 6 shows increasing the percentage of fibers do
not improve the results of apparent volumetric dry
weight, except for the introduction of the leaf mixed with
trunk fiber, the volumetric weight increased by a small
amount, the result of mixing two types of fibers.
- Effect type of fibers on apparent volumetric
weight
No major influence of fiber types on apparent
volumetric dry weight, we concluded that values
approach to 1.2 g/cm3.
Thus even the percentage and type of fibers the gypsum
mortar reinforced with date palm fibers usually has
Figure 3. Preparation specimens of gypsum reinforced by date palm
fibers. a

Figure 4. Specimens of gypsum reinforced by date palm fibers after

b
24h.

Table 5.Types and percentage of fibers used for compressive strength

testing specimens.
size of
%. of No. of
Types of fibers specimens
fibres specimens
(cm)
Control mix 0 4 7x7x7
Leaf mixed with trunk 0.3 2 7x7x7
Sleath kernaf 0.8 2 7x7x7

Root 0.4- 2.5 4 7x7x7

Figure 6. Volumetric density of ref (a), root fibers (b).
Wet root 2 2 7x7x7

Trunk 1.5-6 3 7x7x7

Leaf mixed with trunk
0.3 2 7x7x7
fibers
Fibers remaining on
1 5 7x7x7
sieve 0.6 mm
Fibers remaining on
2.7- 3.5 3 7x7x7
sieve 1mm
Fibers remaining on
2.7 1 7x7x7
sieve 2.36 mm

IV. THE EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS AND

DISCUSSION
Figure 7. Influence the percentage of fibers on volumetric
A. Physical properties density.

- Apparent volumetric weight

Mean apparent volumetric dry weight at 28 days is 1.2
g/cm3 of control mix. Figure. 5 shows the results of the

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5 IJEIT, Special issue for The international Eng. Conf. IECMU2021 , VOL.9,NO. 1, December 2021
does not have major influence on maximum compression
load compare to Ref G as shown in Fig. 10. It observed
that the specimen with 2% given a resistance equal to 131
kN due to internal strength of root fiber or large diameter
of fiber in this mold was higher. Mean values of all used
fibers and varied percentage of fibers compared to control
mix is shown in Fig. 11. Consequently, introduced the
date palm fibers reduced maximum compression load
compared to control mix. And found a valued higher than
control mix due to the reason explained above taking
account the coefficient of variability.
Figure 8. Volumetric densities of different fibers type. - Effect the percentage of fibers on maximum
compressive strength
lightweight comparative to cement mortar of 2.1
g/cm3, Figure. 7. From table 6, so we can be conclude Compressive strength test results indicate that as
that the volumetric density is affected by the type of fiber diameter of fiber increases the maximum compressive
more than its proportion in the gypsum mortar. In strength decreasing with the percentage of fibers, see
addition, the structure of fibers and their diameters have Figure. 12. It is clear that the maximum compressive
been playing an important role than their quantities. strength is approached for all kinds of fibers with the
diverse percentages of fibers but lower the control mix
(Ref G) value as shown in Figure. 13, 14.
However, the water absorption of the developed
composite increased with the increase in date palm fibers
content. As explained in Table 2, the coefficient of
absorption and water content very high for some types of
date palm fibers this leads to increasing fin porosity
especially at interface level. Moreover, the effects of fiber
size, content and porosity on the stiffness of date palm
fibers -gypsum composite. The addition of date palm
fibers resulted in an increase in the stress–strain and
stiffness of date palm fibers gypsum composites and
Figure 9. Maximum compressive strength of control mix (Ref G).
prevented the brittle fracture which can be attributed to
the high strength rupture parameter of date palm fibers.
B. Mechanical properties Thus, date palm fibers are applicable as a reinforcement
for gypsum material in order to develop composite
Mechanical testing of hardened mortar samples after
28 days of curing was performed using cubic samples as materials for several applications in building
explained in Table 3; they were subjected to compressive constructions [15].
loading based on ASTM C109/C109M where the
maximum load and stress at failure were recorded. Note
that the high strength values in some cases due to
structure of fibers, the difficulty in controlling the
dimensions and quantity of the fibers during casting
process.
- Control mix
The mean maximum strength of control mix at 28
days is equal to 11 MPa as shown in Figure. 8 and Table
6.

- Effect the percentage of fibers on maximum Figure 10. Max. compression load values of remaining fibers on
different sieve diameters.
compression load
Figure. 9 shows the maximum applied load on cubical
specimens contain the remaining fibers on different
sieves. Average values is equal to 25 kN for remaining
fibers on sieves of 1mm then is equal to 54 kN of control
mix (Ref G). And with increasing the diameter of sieve
the maximum compression load attain 30 kN but
remaining lower than control mix values. It is clear that
the resistance of reference, control mix (0% fibers)
diminished with added the palm date fibers (22- 30 kN)
with different percentages and varied diameter. For leaf
of root their strength is no significant compared to Figure 11. Max. compression load values of fibers of root.
preceding figure and varied the percentage of fibers from

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H. Aljewifi, A. Edriss, A. Mohamed and H. Farhat/ Experimental Study on the Addition of Date palm Fibers 6

Table 6. Physical and mechanical properties of untreated date palm

fibers- gypsum composite

ɣdry P σ
Specimens % of fibers
g/cm3 kN MPa
0 1.21 53.5 10.9
Control mix (Ref) 0 1.20 54.7 11.2
0 1.20 50.9 10.4
1 1.16 25.5 9.3
1 1.18 26.1 10.0
Fibers remaining on a
1 1.21 24.8 9.5
sieve 0.6 mm
1 1.20 24.5 9.4
Figure 12. Mean max. compression load values of different fibers.
1 1.18 21.7 8.2
2.7 1.19 30.4 6.0
Fibers remaining on a 3.5 1.18 23.8 4.8
sieve 1mm 3.5 1.20 24.0 4.9
Fibers remaining on a
sieve 2.36 mm 2.7 1.20 30.4 6.0
0.8 1.26 21.1 4.31
Sleath Kernaf
0.8 1.21 23.0 4.49
0.4 1.26 22.2 4.3
0.4 1.19 34.6 6.6
Root
2.5 1.1 34.3 6.6
2.5 1.13 31.8 6.1
2 1.34 131.1 25.3
Wet root
Figure 13. Max. compression resistance of remaining fibers on different 2 1.22 19.2 3.8
sieve diameters. 1.5 1.15 23.7 4.6
Trunk 1.5 1.17 30.2 6.1
6 1.18 37.8 7.6
0.3 1.41 26.8 5.2
Leaf mixed with trunk
0.3 1.33 26.5 5.0

Figure. 15 exhibited the mortar reinforced with date

palm fibers after compression test. The failure and
deformation is brittle and resistance of specimens
depends on the quantity of fibers in the specimen.
It can be noted also that the addition of fibres
interrputs the mineral skeleton of the gypsum mortar,
Figure 14. Max. compression resistance of fibers of root. creating voids inside the matrix and increasing its
porosity, by giving it a minimal strength. These
observations are in agreement with the results of previous
research on different fibres mortar studied.

- Effect type of fibers on maximum compression

load
An example for the influence of the type of fiber on the
maximum compression load exhibited in Figure. 16.
Trunk fibers were weak kinds of palm tree as confirmed
in [9]. The results shown maximum compression load
and compressive strength is lower the control mix (Ref
G).
- Effect type of fibers on maximum compressive
strength
From previous figures, we demonstrated the type of
fibers do not have main effect on compression behavior
than diameter of fibers. Figure 17 shows that the trunk
fibers given approximated one-half the strength of control
mix mortar.

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7 IJEIT, Special issue for The international Eng. Conf. IECMU2021 , VOL.9,NO. 1, December 2021
and the bonding between the fiber and gypsum depends
on the type of fiber. In addition introduced the date palm
fibers into gypsum mortar is very weak and has no
effectiveness in mortar compared to control mix mortar.
This is due to chemical reaction between the fibers and
gypsum mortar. Furthermore, an idea to use mixed fibers
did not show any efficacy in increasing compressive
strength. It is also concluded that the conserved medium
has a major role in resisting concrete.

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Figure `5. Mean max compression resistance of different fibers.
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that efficacy using these fibers with low percentage. The [14] H. Benarab, “Matériau composite renforcée par les fibres
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take into account coefficient of variation. So, small
diameter and untreated fibers lead to obtain more
homogenize composite. The larger diameter induces
greater the ability of mortar to withstand the applied load

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H. Aljewifi, A. Edriss, A. Mohamed and H. Farhat/ Experimental Study on the Addition of Date palm Fibers 8

RECOMMENDATIONS
1. For more support previous results, it is suggested to use
microstructure analysis.
2. It is recommended to complete the physical and mechanical
test by make chemical test to understand the reaction at
interface between fibers and gypsum matrix.
3. It is recommended to varied tests results using different date
palm tree kinds and percentages of fibers from 0 to 100% of
same sort of fibers.
4. It is recommended in the future to use pretreatment date
palm fibers in gypsum matrix and studied their effect on
mechanical performance. And investigation on date palm
fibers reinforced gypsum concrete under different curing
conditions.

www.ijeit.misuratau.edu.ly ISSN 2410-4256 Paper ID: EN001