Rapid plasma spray tooling (RPST) is a kind of process that can quickly make a mold from rapid prototyping or nature pattern without limitation of pattern's size or material. In a previous investigation of the authors, the process of coating growth, pore formation and its effect on coating's properties in RPST has been analyzed numerically. The objective of this work is to calculate temperature and stress field during plasma spray process when using a different kind of scanning path. In mesoanalysis, two-scale asymptotic homogenization theory is introduced to predict the effective properties of plasma sprayed coatings with porous. Based on this, in macro process simulation, a FEM software developed system has been used to analyze the effects of gun scanning path on the temperature and stress field. The numerical examples for the four kinds of gun scanning paths are presented. In the scanning paths of s-shape (perpendicular to), spire in, spire out and s-shape (parallel to), characteristic of the temperature field under spire out path is the best, and the maximum stress and deflection under spire out path are the smallest after the model cool. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.