Cold sprayed WC-Co metal matrix composite coatings have shown great potential in wear-resistance applications. This work aims to use experimental and numerical methods to clarify the deposition and particle-substrate bonding behavior of a single porous WC-17Co particle onto various substrates. To achieve this objective, porous WC-17Co particles were used as the feedstock; soft Al 2024 (Al alloy) and hard stainless steel 316 (SS) were used as the substrates. The experimental results revealed that brittle WC-Co particles tended to remain intact after depositing on a soft Al alloy substrate, but underwent serious fracture when impacting on a hard SS substrate. Further results indicated that the high energy dissipation and the consequent high stress concentration in the WC-Co particle was the main reason for inducing the particle fracture. In addition, two different mechanical interlocking mechanisms were identified during the WC-Co particle deposition process (namely WC reinforcement interlock and WC-Co particle interlock), dominating the particle-substrate bonding. A soft Al alloy substrate resulted in better interlocking than a hard SS substrate, thereby the corresponding particle bonding ratio was also much higher.decades. Existing studies have demonstrated that decarburization and phase transformation can be effectively avoided in cold sprayed WC-Co coatings due to the low working temperature [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19]. This is a unique advantage that other thermal spray processes cannot achieve. Moreover, cold sprayed WC-Co coatings were also reported to possess high hardness (ranging from 800 to 2000 HV). Such high coating hardness is comparable to or even higher than that of thermal sprayed coatings [8,10,[12][13][14][15]. In addition, cold sprayed WC-Co coatings also had excellent tribological performance. Compared with HVOF-sprayed WC-Co coatings, cold sprayed coatings had lower wear rate under both ball-on-disk sliding and dry abrasion tests [10,12,13,16].Single particle deposition experiment is of great importance to well understand the deposition and bonding features of a cold sprayed particle with a substrate [20]. In the case of cold sprayed WC-Co, single particle deposition was also conducted in some previous works [6,[21][22][23][24]. It was reported that powder structure significantly affected the particle deposition behavior. High-porosity WC-Co particle was more likely to fracture during impact with the substrate due to poor cohesion strength [21,25]. As most parts of such fractured particles will rebound, the coating deposition efficiency of high-porosity WC-Co powders was relatively low. On the other hand, substrate hardness was also found to pose some impacts on the particle deposition behavior [6,21]. WC-Co particles were more difficult to deposit on hard substrates than on soft substrates [19]. Although existing studies have revealed some important phenomena involved in the single WC-Co particle deposition process, there are still many other issues to be clarified, s...