Crank cases of modern car-engines are made in general of light metal alloys, mostly aluminium alloys. Due to the low hardness of these materials, the use of cylinder liners, in general made of grey cast iron is required. The use of cylinder liners also leads to several disadvantages, such as the increase of the engines weight. The aim of this work in the long term is to replace these cylinder liners with a thermally sprayed nano-structured composite coating, characterised by high hardness. Therefore in this study a coating process employing a plasma transferred wire arc unit and a cored wire are used.