A short-term exposure limit (STEL) is the acceptable average exposure over a short period of time, usually 15 minutes as long as the time-weighted average is not exceeded. STEL is a term used in occupational health,

industrial hygiene Occupational hygiene (United States: industrial hygiene (IH)) is the anticipation, recognition, evaluation, control, and confirmation (ARECC) of protection from hazards at work that may result in injury, illness, or affect the well being of work ...

and

toxicology Toxicology is a scientific discipline, overlapping with biology, chemistry, pharmacology, and medicine, that involves the study of the adverse effects of chemical substances on living organisms and the practice of diagnosing and treating e ...

. The STEL may be a

legal Law is a set of rules that are created and are law enforcement, enforceable by social or governmental institutions to regulate behavior,Robertson, ''Crimes against humanity'', 90. with its precise definition a matter of longstanding debate. ...

limit in the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country Continental United States, primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., ...

for exposure of an employee to a

chemical substance A chemical substance is a form of matter having constant chemical composition and characteristic properties. Some references add that chemical substance cannot be separated into its constituent elements by physical separation methods, i.e., wit ...

. The

Occupational Safety and Health Administration The Occupational Safety and Health Administration'' (OSHA ) is a large regulatory agency of the United States Department of Labor that originally had federal visitorial powers to inspect and examine workplaces. Congress established the agen ...

(U.S. OSHA) has set OSHA-STELs for

1,3-butadiene 1,3-Butadiene () is the organic compound with the formula (CH2=CH)2. It is a colorless gas that is easily condensed to a liquid. It is important industrially as a precursor to synthetic rubber. The molecule can be viewed as the union of two v ...

benzene Benzene is an organic chemical compound with the molecular formula C6H6. The benzene molecule is composed of six carbon atoms joined in a planar ring with one hydrogen atom attached to each. Because it contains only carbon and hydrogen atoms ...

and

ethylene oxide Ethylene oxide is an organic compound with the formula . It is a cyclic ether and the simplest epoxide: a three-membered ring consisting of one oxygen atom and two carbon atoms. Ethylene oxide is a colorless and flammable gas with a faintly sw ...

. For chemicals, STEL assessments are usually done for 15 minutes and expressed in

parts per million In science and engineering, the parts-per notation is a set of pseudo-units to describe small values of miscellaneous dimensionless quantities, e.g. mole fraction or mass fraction. Since these fractions are quantity-per-quantity measures, th ...

(ppm), or sometimes in milligrams per cubic meter (mg/m³). The American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists publishes a more extensive list of STELs as threshold limit values (TLV-STEL).

Similar national exposure limits

*United Kingdom **COSHH (''Control of Substances Hazardous to Health''). *Australia **OES Occupational Exposure StandardOES Occupational Exposure Standard
*France **VLEP 8h00 ('' Valeur Limite d’Exposition Professionnelle 8h00'') **VLEP CT ('' Valeur Limite d’Exposition Professionnelle Court Terme'') *Netherlands **MAC ('' Maximaal Aanvaarde Concentratie'') *Malaysia **PEL (''Permissible Exposure Limits'') *Poland **NDSCh ('' Najwyższe dopuszczalne stężenie chwilowe'') *Russia **ПДК ('' предельно допустимая концентрация'')

Notes

{{DEFAULTSORT:Short-Term Exposure Limit Concentration indicators Industrial hygiene Occupational safety and health Toxicology

Similar national exposure limits

See also

Notes