A muffle furnace, is an oven type equipment, that can reach high temperatures.

The use of a muffle furnace is to burn off specific types of compounds. For instance, for a standard determination of the amount of inorganic components within an object, a muffle furnace can be used to burn off all the organic material (which is roughly said always < 500 oC). It principle thereof is plainly to auto-ignite the organic material, due to high temperature Muffle furnaces are most often utilized in laboratories as a compact means of creating extremely high temperature atmospheres. They can be fine turned to hold very accurate and stable temperatures with very little variance. They are used to test the characteristics of materials at these extremely high and accurate temperatures.