A small insertable oven for benchmarking the boronizing characteristic
s of solid compounds, such as decaborane and carborane, has been devel
oped for the Phaedrus-T tokamak. Assembly and installation of the oven
are relatively easy as the oven design utilizes a Langmuir probe driv
e assembly, which is standard equipment on most tokamaks and allows th
e oven to be inserted into the tokamak without requiring a vent. Films
deposited by heating carborane into the vapor state with the oven are
found to be spatially nonuniform in both thickness and in the ratio o
f boron to carbon as compared to films deposited with trimethylboron,
a gaseous compound. Overall plasma performance is not found to be grea
tly affected by whether decaborane, carborane or trimethylboron is use
d for boronization in Phaedrus-T. (C) 1996 American Institute of Physi
cs.