The process industries are characterized by the significant consumption of fresh
resources. This is a critical issue, which calls for an effective strategy towards more
sustainable operations. One approach that favors sustainability and resource
conservation is material recycle and/or reuse. In this regard, an integrated framework is
an essential element in sustainable development. An effective reuse strategy must
consider the process as a whole and develop plant-wide strategies. While the role of
mass and energy integration has been acknowledged as a holistic basis for sustainable
design, it is worth noting that there are many design problems that are driven by
properties or functionalities of the streams and not by their chemical constituency. In this
dissertation, the notion of componentless design, which was introduced by Shelley and
El-Halwagi in 2000, was employed to identify optimal strategies for resource
conservation, material substitution, and overall process integration.
First, the focus was given on the problem of identifying rigorous targets for material
reuse in property-based applications by introducing a new property-based pinch analysis
and visualization technique. Next, a non-iterative, property-based algebraic technique,
which aims at determining rigorous targets of the process performance in materialrecycle
networks, was developed. Further, a new property-based procedure for
determining optimal process modifications on a property cluster diagram to optimize the
allocation of process resources and minimize waste discharge was also discussed. In
addition, material substitution strategies were considered for optimizing both the process
and the fresh properties. In this direction, a new process design and molecular synthesis methodology was evolved by using the componentless property-cluster domain and
Group Contribution Methods (GCM) as key tools in developing a generic framework
and systematic approach to the problem of simultaneous process and molecular design
