Boronization

Boronization is a wall conditioning technique for fusion machines (such as tokamaks), where a thin film of boron is deposited on the walls of the vacuum vessel in order to reduce the impurity content (for example oxygen) which can be deleterious for fusion plasma operation.

This technique can be seen as a plasma-assisted chemical vapor deposition of boron. The typical workflow involves performing a glow discharge and injecting a gas containing boron into the vacuum vessel chamber.

Boronization as a wall conditioning technique was first developed for the TEXTOR tokamak at the Forschungszentrum Jülich. It is now a well-established technique and is widely used in many tokamaks in the world.