Haas, E. Cardenas, E. Sirna, A.P. JACoW Publishing Geneva, Switzerland 2673-5520 978-3-95450-229-5 10.18429/JACoW-MEDSI2020-WEPC05 English 317-319 laser shielding GUI radiation FEL Contribution to a conference proceedings 2021 2021-10 https://doi.org/10.18429/JACoW-MEDSI2020-WEPC05 https://jacow.org/medsi2020/papers/wepc05.pdf A compact sample furnace was designed and tested at the X-ray Powder Diffraction (XPD) beamline at NSLS-II. This furnace is designed to heat small samples to temperatures of 2000 - 2300°C while allowing the XPD photon beam to pass through with adequate downstream opening in the furnace to collect diffraction data. Since the XPD samples did not reach the desired temperatures initially, engineering studies, tests, and incremental improvements were planned and undertaken to improve performance. The design of the sample furnace will be presented as background, and engineering details will be presented in this paper describing work undertaken to improve the furnace design to allow sample temperatures to reach 2000 - 2300°C or more.