Temperature is a key parameter in the thermal spray process and is a consequence of the heat flux experienced by the workpiece. This paper deals with the estimation of the heat flux transmitted to a workpiece from an atmospheric plasma spray torch during the preheating process often implemented in thermal spraying. An inverse heat conduction problem solution using a conjugate gradient method was considered to determine the heat flux starting from a known temperature distribution. Results from the later method were used to train an artificial neural network to discover correlations between selected processing parameters and heat flux.