An attachment for commercial X-ray powder diffractometers is described. The device is made of four different parts that are largely independent of each other, and can be freely interchanged or replaced, and aligned independently. It can be home-built, or modified, with high flexibility according to user requirements, and has been tested on different problems concerning high-temperature phase transitions and solid-state reactions up to 1200 °C under vacuum, under inert gas or under various oxygen partial pressures. Examples are given of possible designs of the various parts.

A recently developed Rigaku parallel-beam X-ray diffraction system equipped with a parabolic graded-multilayer mirror in the incident beam and a parallel-slits analyzer in the diffracted beam was used for precision high-temperature diffraction studies. The lattice parameters a and c of α-Al2O3 at room temperature and up to 1473 K were determined with precision in the range of 0.6–7.3×10−5. The thermal expansion coefficients for a and c agreed with literature values to better than 3%. The system was used successfully also to determine the Debye characteristic temperature of Si and to study structural phase transition of LaCoO3 from rhombohedral at room temperature to cubic at 1700 K.