The research work performed in this thesis has been carried out at the Production Tech-nology Centre where the Thermal Spray research group of University West has its work-shop and labs.

This research work has been performed in collaboration with the International Advanced Research Centre for Powder Metallurgy and New Materials (ARCI), Hyderabad, India.

First of all, I would like to express my sincere thanks and gratitude to my supervisors Dr. Nicolaie Markocsan and Dr. Nicholas Curry for their guidance, great support and valuable suggestions without which this work could not have been possible. I would also like to thanks Prof. Per Nylén for keeping faith in me and providing me an opportunity to work at PTC, which is a great place to perform research. It is my pleasure being their student and I wish I would keep learning from all of them, both on academic and personal grounds. I would also like to thank my colleagues at PTC Mr. Mohit Gupta and Mr. Stefan Björklund, for their help and support during this work.

I would like to acknowledge the H.C. Starck Company for its financial support for the pro-ject; Dr. Filofteia-Laura TOMA at Fraunhofer IWS, Dresden to help us in spraying suspen-sion sprayed YSZ top coats, G Shivkumar from ARCI to help us in spraying solution pre-cursor sprayed top coats and Toni Bogdanoff, Jönköping University to help us in conduct-ing the LFA experiment