the substrate and limit the stress level, 2 air-cooling jets were added to the spray configuration to lower the coating temperature during deposition.Experiments were carried out considering 5 processing parameters: arc current (A), hydrogen ratio (B), total plasma gas flow rate (C), powder carrier gas flow rate (D) and injector diameter (E). The three first parameters are known to influence significantly the plasma jet properties (enthalpy, velocity, etc.) and the last ones influence particle trajectories in the plasma jet. A factorial design L 16 (2 5 ) was used to vary each of these parameters into 2 significant levels tacking into account all possible couple interdependencies as shown in Table 1.Coating friction behaviour characterization: Friction tests were performed using a Pin-On-Disc (POD) arrangement on a CSEM 1 tribometer. The POD test is a model test for determining friction characteristics and wear behaviors of two solid surfaces being in sliding contact. In this study, test configuration corresponded to a single point contact. Before performing the test, the samples were ground to lower their surface roughness (i.e., average roughness less than 1 lm). The coated sample were than slided against a 6 mm ball made of WC/Co under an applied load of 5 N. The sliding contact was maintained at 6 mm from the sample centre. The sample was rotated at 394 rpm corresponding to a linear speed of 0.33 m.s ±1 . The sliding distance was 1000 m reached after 51 min.