Environmental Systems Engineering for Industrial Air Quality: Pollutant Transport, Exposure Assessment, and Risk-Based Control in Built and Industrial Environments

Industrial facilities, buildings, and transportation systems generate complex air pollutant mixtures, including suspended particulates, harmful gases, and thermally-modulated contaminants. This creates significant risks to occupational health and the surrounding environment. Managing these pollutants demands an integrated environmental systems engineering approach that connects source characterisation and pollutant transport modelling with environmental risk assessment and the design of evidence-based control technologies. This Research Topic brings together original research and reviews that apply environmental systems analysis to ventilation, dust suppression, and thermal-humidity control, with the goal of reducing environmental health burdens, improving indoor-outdoor air quality linkages, and advancing sustainable industrial and building practice.

Air pollution has become a prominent environmental and public health problem worldwide, characterized by wide sources and complex diffusion processes at multiple spatial scales. Underground mining operations continuously emit mine dust, diesel particulate matter and various toxic and harmful gases. The restricted ventilation underground is highly likely to induce occupational health risks. At the same time, pollutants can be discharged through ventilation and diffuse and migrate into the atmosphere, posing a continuous and potential negative impact on the local surrounding atmospheric environment and the air quality of residential communities. People spend 90% of their time indoors, and the infiltration of pollutants from building materials and outdoor sources poses a significant and overlooked threat to indoor air quality. Urban block typology and building layout significantly affect pollutant dispersion at the street level. Air pollutants cause respiratory diseases and increase medical expenses, imposing a huge economic burden, highlighting the urgent need for research on their diffusion, fate, health impacts, and advanced mitigation strategies.

Key unresolved issues include unclear multi-scale pollutant migration mechanisms (underground-indoor-urban block), insufficient understanding of combined health risks from mixed pollutants, and gaps in cost-effective mitigation technologies. To address these, we will integrate computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations, field measurements, and health risk assessments to explore wind tunnel tests and 3D printing models for pollution diffusion analysis in urban neighbourhoods, efficient control techniques for underground mining pollutants, and research on indoor PM2.5 health risks and mitigation strategies. Our goal is to explore cross scale pollutant interactions and develop a comprehensive mitigation framework that leverages the interdisciplinary focus of the journal to bridge the gap between environmental science and public health.

The aim of this Research Topic is to call for high-quality original research articles, reviews, and case studies to showcase cross spatial scale perspectives and solutions related to air pollutants. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Pollutant diffusion mechanisms in underground mining, tunnel and optimization of ventilation control

• Indoor air quality influencing factors, pollutant sources, and purification technologies

• Effects of urban block typology and building layout on pollutant dispersion and exposure assessment

• Transmission characteristics of cross-space pollutants and their health risks

• Innovative, sustainable mitigation technologies and policy implications

Studies reporting engineering performance improvements alone, without explicit linkage to environmental exposure reduction or health risk outcomes, are outside the scope of this collection.