Abrasive wear occurs in many engineering applications, e.g. on cutting tools, on components exposed to rapidly moving slurry, or on rolls in the paper industry. In most cases it is detrimental, leading to increased surface roughness and surface damage, dimensional changes of components and increased clearances between moving components. [1] Many materials used for applications, in which abrasive wear resistance is a major requirement, are based on cermets, consisting of a metallic matrix reinforced by dispersed ceramic particles. This type of material combines metallic properties like ductility and toughness with ceramic characteristics such as high hardness, leading to high wear resistance. To improve the mechanical properties of these composite materials further, the microstructure of cermets was refined e. g. by high-energy milling to the nanoscale range. [2,3] Such nanocrystalline cermets exhibit enhanced mechanical properties compared to the microcrystalline materials due to the extremely small grain dimensions. [4,5] As an example, Figure 1 summarizes the hardness of nano-and microcrystalline WC-Co composites as a function of their mean hard phase particle size reported in. [6][7][8][9] As expected, the hardness increases with decreasing grain size.The application of cermet coatings instead of costly massive components to protect locally against wear or corrosion is widely utilised in industry. [10] Especially wear resistant composite coatings, e. g. on WC-Co basis, have found their way into an increasing number of applications. [11,12] In the present work, vacuum plasma spraying (VPS) was used for the preparation of the nano-and the microcrystalline coatings. The VPS technique has the advantage to minimize the oxidation of the spray particles and of the deposited coatings during spraying. TiC-Ni based composite materials, containing Mo, Co and N, are chosen to demonstrate influences by using nanocrystalline instead of microcrystalline powders in thermal spraying, which is expected to increase the wear resistance of the coatings. As compared to WC or Cr 3 C 2 , TiC shows significantly higher thermal and thermodynamic stabilities and can lead to less undesired reactions with the metallic matrixes. Thus, the respective TiC-based composites should be ideal to study size effects. As demonstrated for nano-and microcrystalline high velocity oxy-fuel (HVOF) sprayed WC-Co coatings, enhanced kinetics and low thermal stability of carbides can have a detrimental influence on wear performance. [13,14] Correspondingly, it was found that TiCFeCr coatings produced by HVOF spraying show higher COMMUNICATIONS ADVANCED ENGINEERING MATERIALS 2006, 8, No. 5