Dr. Muhammad Al-Maidani reviews the durability of fibers produced from palm leaves (palm leaves) at a scientific conference (Al-Jazeera)
Among the abilities enjoyed by the Associate Professor at the Faculty of Engineering and Materials Science at the German University and the Executive Director of the Valorizen Research and Development Center in Cairo, Dr. Mohamed Al-Maidani, is the “different eye” that is able to see what others do not see in terms of economic opportunities in things that we set foot on every day, and we do not see... She cares.
Al-Maidani does not know how he developed this ability. Is it the result of his upbringing in a family with a history in the world of finance and economics, or is it a talent and a divine gift?
But in the end, it was a reason for enabling this Arab scientist to employ his knowledge as a specialist in fiber science, to see economic opportunities in the biomass of palm waste, which helps enhance sustainability and improve livelihoods for all.
While many researchers stop at the laboratory production stage that allows them to write scientific research, Al-Maidani always keeps an eye in his research choices on the economic dimension, and whether the idea that he will spend his time and effort to implement can be transformed into a product that competes in the markets or not, and this is what encouraged him. In partnership with others, they launched a company that transforms research outputs in the field of agricultural waste exploitation, primarily palm trees, into semi-industrial technology ready to be expanded and applied on an industrial, economic scale.
In a very short time, this company achieved many successes, culminating in the announcement on January 29 of last year that it had won the Khalifa International Award for Date Palm and Agricultural Innovation in the Pioneering Innovations branch, for inventing the first textile fiber from palm leaves. They are also close to opening The first factory to convert the waste of the blessed tree into products, including agricultural media and alternative soil.
In an exclusive interview with Al Jazeera Net, Al-Maidani tells the details of that research trip during which he addressed one of the most important problems of scientific research in the Arab world, which is the disconnect between scientific research and application, and the pitfalls that he succeeded in overcoming during that trip, and he talked about the most important marketable products that It can be obtained from the remains of palm trees...and to the text of the dialogue.
Dr. Muhammad Al-Maidani (left) speaks to Al Jazeera Net correspondent (Al Jazeera)
It is noteworthy in your CV that you are of Syrian nationality, but your university education was in the Faculty of Engineering at the Egyptian University of Ain Shams. So why did you choose an Egyptian university?
I have inflicted a deep wound from the beginning... Yes, I am Syrian by nationality, but I was born in Egypt to a Syrian father and mother who have lived in Egypt since the sixties, and no one knows my nationality except when I have to produce my Syrian passport to complete a government service, but I have an Egyptian accent and education, and I drank from obtaining it as The Egyptians say, “My wife is Egyptian and my children are Egyptian because their mother is Egyptian. Despite this long life of residence in Egypt, the dream of citizenship is still far-fetched. I am forced to renew my residency every three years, and I face clear discrimination when dealing with any government agency just because I am of Syrian nationality. To imagine that the company in which we are sitting now, which includes partners from Britain, the procedure for establishing it was greatly disrupted due to a security refusal on my person, while there was no objection to my British partners.
Sorry if my question aroused concerns that are evident on your face. My dialogue aims primarily to present your successful experience in exploiting date palm waste, which recently won an international award.
No, not at all. I am happy with the question. Perhaps my voice will reach you. I am Egyptian by birth, residence, and education. I could have continued in the United States of America while obtaining my doctorate from the University of North Carolina, but I preferred to return to Egypt despite the attempt of my supervisor at the university, who is of Egyptian origin, to dissuade me from this decision. Thank God I did not regret my decision, and I was able to achieve a success story even though the road was full of bumps and was not paved.
The fire in the village of Al-Rashida in the Egyptian New Valley Governorate has awakened interest in the harm of exploiting the by-products of palm pruning (Al-Jazeera - Archive)
Is it possible to summarize the chapters of this story, perhaps it will be useful to young researchers?
I grew up in a well-off family, and throughout my years of primary and middle school I was not an outstanding student, but in the high school stage I paid more attention to education, and this resulted in me obtaining high grades that qualified me to join the engineering college in which I chose to study, specifically in the mechanical engineering department, until... I can provide an addition to my family's "business", as we had a "business" in Egypt in the field of spinning and weaving.
I finished my university years by ranking third among my classmates, but my Syrian nationality prevented me from being appointed as a teaching assistant at the university. This, of course, was not my ambition at the time, because as I told you, I chose to study engineering, so that I could support the family’s “business” in the field of spinning and weaving. .
But I was surprised that studying at the Faculty of Engineering at Ain Shams University was not sufficiently useful for the goal for which I entered the college. Perhaps the most important advantage of studying at the college was my acquaintance with the school of Dr. Hamid Al-Mousli, professor of production engineering at the college and the owner of the pioneering experience in exploiting agricultural waste - or as He likes to call it "agricultural residue" - the production of products of economic value.
Dr. Muhammad Al-Maidani (left) with Dr. Hamid Al-Mawsili, pioneer of the school of agricultural waste exploitation, at a scientific conference (Al-Jazeera)
My thoughts turned to searching for an opportunity to obtain graduate studies abroad, and I limited my choices to universities in America that have a specialized program in textiles. I applied to all the universities until I was able to obtain an opportunity at the University of North Carolina, which has a college specialized in textiles, which is “Wilson College of Textiles.” ", and obtained a Master's degree in Textile and Apparel Technology and Management (2012).
Despite the advice of my supervisor, who is of Egyptian origin, Dr. Abdel Fattah Siam, to complete postgraduate studies at the university, continuing in the field of scientific research and university work was not my goal, and I thought that my goal had been achieved, which was to arm myself with knowledge that would help me support the “family business” in the field of spinning and weaving. Indeed, I was satisfied with my master’s degree and returned to Egypt in 2012.
Of course, the atmosphere was not encouraging upon return in 2012, due to the unrest and sit-ins that followed the January 25, 2011 revolution.
This is exactly what happened, but the truth is that the events of the revolution and the unrest that followed were one of the chapters in the story of the decline of the textile industry in Egypt, and the first of those chapters began with Egypt’s accession to the Global Trade Agreement (GATT), whose provisions require lifting customs restrictions on imported goods. Among them are textiles. This agreement gave Egypt a grace period of 10 years to reconcile the situation before its provisions were implemented. Thus, the textile industry began to enter into “unequal” competition with products imported from abroad, as this industry must compete with countries such as China with Lower labor costs and more advanced technology, at a time when all industry inputs are imported from abroad in hard currency, which after the revolution witnessed great fluctuations. All of this, of course, affected the market share of factories operating in Egypt and limited their competitiveness. I was not able to continue for a long time in This frustrating climate, and I sought to return again to America, and I contacted my master’s supervisor, Dr. Abdel Fattah Siam, who helped me return to complete my doctorate at the “Wilson College of Textiles” at the University of North Carolina.
A design illustrating the circular economy of palm leaf fibers (Al Jazeera)
Did your thinking change at this stage, making you feel that the industry is facing difficult challenges, and that it would be better for you to focus on the research and academic aspects?
No, on the contrary, I realized at that time that it was a time for innovative ideas to develop the industry, so I sought my doctorate to lean more towards the research side, unlike the master’s degree, which tended towards the technological and administrative side.
During that stage, I liked the model of a university professor in America, whose time is divided between teaching at the university, conducting scientific research, and cooperating with industry. Although I hated teaching, I began to relate to it because of the way an American professor taught.
The first spark was sparked in my mind to search for innovative ideas to develop the textile industry based on new raw materials while I was participating in supervising a master’s student from Brazil who was working on extracting fibers from tree waste in her local environment. So I said to myself at the time, why don’t I search in my local environment for a raw material? Similar, so I discovered that date palm waste is the best, and during vacations I used to collect some of it and travel with it to America to conduct research on these wastes, which ultimately led me to acknowledge that we are facing a treasure that we are wasting without benefiting from it.
After I obtained my doctorate in 2016, my supervisor, Dr. Abdel Fattah Siam, was surprised by my desire to return again to Egypt. This was a strange decision at that time. At a time when researchers were traveling to the West and America after the economic conditions became difficult, I had the opportunity to To continue in America, but I preferred to return, and the reason is that I fell in love with palm waste, and of course I will not find that material in the American environment.
Before returning, I contacted foreign universities operating in Egypt in order to secure an academic path for myself, because as I told you, while working on my doctorate, I became fascinated by the model of a university professor that combines teaching, scientific research, and work in industry, and I was approved for an opportunity at a German university with the support of the Dean of the Faculty of Engineering at the time, who The current president of the university is Dr. Yasser Hegazy.
But I was surprised that foreign universities operating in Egypt consume most of the professor’s teaching time, so my decision was to work with them on the “part-time” system, even though it does not provide much income so that I can achieve the trilogy of “teaching, scientific research, and industry.”
A small pot planted with a palm shoot, made using palm fibers and containing ready-made soil used from tree waste (Al Jazeera)
Did you return to “family business” from your doctoral journey with new ideas for developing it?
Unfortunately, things deteriorated further during the years of my doctoral studies, so I decided that my direction would be my own “business.” This desire of mine coincided with the desire of two friends from Egypt whom I met at the Wilson College of Textiles at the University of North Carolina. We established a company to provide consulting to the industry, and then we established a company in cooperation. With British partners, it works in the field of exploiting waste and converting it into valuable products.
Although the company is not solely dedicated to working with date palm waste, I notice from the “brochure” you gave me that most of the products you seek to market come from palm waste?
Thank God, I have an eye that is able to detect economic opportunities and seek to invest in them. As I walk on the road, my eyes do not stop searching and capturing opportunities that may be set foot upon and we do not realize their value.
Certainly, growing up in a family that owned a private “business” helped in this, but I ask specifically about the reasons for the trend towards “palm waste”, and why did you not think, for example, of the waste of banana trees or the waste of rice cultivation (rice straw)?
I was looking for the most widespread raw material, not only in Egypt, but in the Arab world, because I was thinking of setting out for broader and broader horizons, and in our Arab world there are no more widespread raw materials than date palm waste, and the reason is the widespread spread of that blessed tree, which has grown the cultivated area. It ranges from 200 thousand hectares (a hectare is equivalent to 2.4711 acres) in the 1960s, to more than one million hectares now, and this area accommodates 140 million palm trees, most of which are concentrated in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Egypt, Algeria, the Sultanate of Oman, Sudan and Libya, and these large numbers of palm trees do not only produce dates. However, it produces the annual pruning products of Jarid and Arjoun, which are estimated at about 4.8 million tons (dry weight), and we extract useful raw materials from them, the most important of which is high-performance palm fibres.
These palm by-products were used in popular industries such as cages, mats, and baskets, but with modernity and the resulting decline in interest in these products, these by-products lost their value, and even became the main cause of palm tree fires, as their presence near the trees is fuel. For those fires, such as the one that broke out in the village of “Al-Rashida” in the Egyptian New Valley Governorate in 2018, which caused the loss of 20,000 palm trees, and similar fires occurred in different regions of the Arab world, such as fires in the city of “Dalqo” in 2014 in Sudan, and cities in Saudi Arabia: Tabuk 2018 and Al-Jawf. 2019, Najran 2020, Ouargla 2020 in Algeria, and Tazirbu 2020 in Libya.
Instead of these products being a cause of fires, I looked into making use of them to produce products of economic value, so I was guided, with the help of a research team that included my partners Tamer Hamouda from the National Research Center in Egypt, Ahmed Hassanein from Alexandria University, and Lubna Al-Saifi, a researcher at the German University, to produce textile fibers from palm leaves. (Palm Fill), and we recently received the Khalifa International Award for Date Palm and Agricultural Innovation, in the Pioneering Innovations branch, for this innovation.
One of the parts of the car was made using "Palm Fill" fibers produced from palm leaves (Al Jazeera)
Perhaps the clear advantage of your product is your success in providing it from cheap materials, but what about the quality, and the ability to compete with other fibers extracted from natural sources?
(He takes out his mobile phone to extract a picture of him carrying out a practical experiment at a conference to test the durability of palm leaf fibers)... As you can see, they are durable fibers, and at the same time they are lightweight and have thermal insulation qualities, so they are no less efficient than flax fibers and hemp stalk (a plant from which it is made Hashish, which are the two most common raw materials used in manufacturing car parts.
For the first time I know that hemp stalk fibers are used in the manufacture of automobile parts.
(He takes out his phone again to extract a picture explaining the manufacturing process)... As you can see, this interior roof of the car, the interior part of the doors, and the rear trunk are manufactured from polymer compounds, but recently there has been a trend to use plant fibers as reinforcement materials for these vehicles.
In the beginning, car companies resorted to using particleboard, but they did not like to continue using that material because they needed lighter solutions. So they used polymer compounds reinforced with fiberglass, but they are not environmentally friendly because they are not biodegradable and recyclable. This caused car manufacturers a problem because of the presence of Environmental requirements require a percentage of the car's components to be recyclable. Companies have found what they are looking for in polymer compounds reinforced with plant fibers. In this context, companies use flax fibers as a main component, and fibers extracted from the stem of the hemp plant.
Because flax is used in other textile industries in the Arab world, and of course the cultivation of hemp is not permitted in many countries even if there is benefit from its fibers, the long textile fibers extracted from palm leaves represent a good alternative, as you can see in this picture, where we made the same parts from car using it.
So the story apparently is not a competition between one material and another, but the goal is to provide other solutions?
More than 80% of plant fibers come from jute, flax and coconut crops. Likewise, we get 80% of our plant fibers from only 4 countries: Bangladesh, India, France and Vietnam. Therefore, the increase in the rate of global production of plant fibers has been very slow over the years. Over the past decades, it has reached a plateau with a compound annual growth rate; From 2011 to 2018, it did not exceed 0.6%. For this reason, palm fibers have promising opportunities for spread, because they are no less efficient than other types of fibers, but rather more. They have a specific tensile strength that is five times higher than structural steel, and it is equal to that found in Linen and hemp have a high ability to absorb vibrations, and have a higher sound insulation capacity than glass and carbon fibres, in addition to a high efficiency in thermal insulation that exceeds that of carbon fibres. It has a high cellulose percentage of up to 70%, and it has a thermal stability of up to To 226°C.
With all these advantages, it is lightweight, as it is 50% lighter than fiberglass, 8% lighter than flax and hemp, and contains prominent lateral microfibers that create mechanical interactions when used to reinforce composite materials, which helps in the bonding process.
Were you the first to think of extracting long textile fibers from palm leaves, or did others precede you in this direction?
We are the first to think of extracting long textile fibres, and therefore we have a patent registered in the United Kingdom, and another internationally for this invention. There were previous attempts to employ palm fibres, but in a way that did not preserve its advantages, as minced palm leaves were used at a rate not exceeding 5%. As a filler for plastic in industries such as the manufacture of plastic chairs, this minced meat consisted of 46% cellulose fibers, which were naturally no longer long after being minced, and were not pure because they were mixed with lignin, hemicellulose, and natural materials similar to gum. The value of what we did was that we succeeded in extracting these fibers without mincing, including It maintains its length that qualifies it for use in many industries.
How did you succeed in that?
This is the secret of the invention, and therefore I will refrain from going into the fine technical details to ensure that our effort is not wasted, but I will explain to you in general what we have done, as our technology relies on extracting long textile fibers with a high degree of purity from the secondary pruning products of date palms, such as palm leaves and palm leaves. This process depends on removing the lignin and hemicellulose adjacent to the vascular fibrous bundles with the products of pruning, separating the fibrous bundles into fine fibers and getting rid of the internal cavity without causing any damage or breakage of the fibers.
"Palm Fill" fibers are used in building and construction works to support gypsum works (Al Jazeera)
You focused your talk on using these fibers in making car parts. Is there another use for these fibers?
(He returns to his mobile phone pictures again)... As you can see, it can be used in building and construction work to reinforce gypsum works, thermal insulating linings, carpets and floor coverings, and it can also be used in the manufacture of sports equipment such as surfboards, snowboards, yachts and boats. In the field of packaging, it can be used in the manufacture of bags, burlap fabrics, and food and beverage containers. It is also used in the manufacture of ropes, ropes, and various types of papers, such as banknotes, decorative notes, and filters.
"Palm Fill" fibers are used in the manufacture of different types of papers (Al Jazeera)
In addition to fibres, are there other investment opportunities from palm waste?
(He returns to his mobile phone again, but to communicate with the company’s administrative staff, requesting that he bring a small pot of plants)... As you can see, this pot planted with a palm shoot was made using palm fibres, and the ready-made soil used inside it was prepared from the waste of the palm tree, and this is a good occasion to tell you that our company will open The first factory of its kind to produce ready-made soil from date palm waste will soon come, and this activity will be the nucleus for successively starting to produce other products based on palm waste, such as the production of textile fibers from palm leaves on a large commercial scale.
Ready soil and a variety of products made from palm waste (Al Jazeera)
Years ago, I conducted an interview with Dr. Hamid Al-Mousili, a pioneer in the field of researching benefits from agricultural waste, and at the end I asked him to summarize his professional experience in one phrase. He said, “I am the ambassador of God’s neglected creatures.” What if I asked you the same request?
(He is silent for a long time)... You can describe me as a seeker of economic opportunities in agricultural waste.
I feel that your company's experience seems more profit-seeking than Dr. Al-Mousili's experience, which seems more inclined towards social aspects?
Dr. Al-Mousli is my professor at the Faculty of Engineering, Ain Shams University, and he is the founder of the Scientific School for Waste Utilization, or as he likes to call it “agricultural remains.” Therefore, we decided to name the main building in our new factory after him, but the point of disagreement between us and him is what I explained in Your question, our professor, Dr. Al-Mousili, leans towards the social aspects that make the technology he has developed available in the commons to everyone who wants to know its details. Therefore, projects based on it are not destined to continue for a long time, while we believe that technology should be the property of its owners, and be directed to serve society. But under the supervision of its owners.
But you are seeking profit, while Dr. Al-Mousli is not seeking that?
What is the problem with our pursuit of profit as long as the community will also profit? When we decide to open a factory, will we be the only ones who benefit?! The factory will provide job opportunities for the local community there, and the farmers will also receive financial income in exchange for providing us with the products of pruning palm trees. Is it better to take ideas? The form of “business” so that it can live and develop, or does it take the social form in which ideas die?
Source: Al Jazeera