To eliminate cracks caused by thermal expansion mismatch between ZrC coating and carbon-carbon composites, a kind of ZrC/C composite coating was designed as an interlayer. The atmospheric pressure chemical vapor deposition was used as a method to achieve co-deposition of ZrC and C from ZrCl4-C3H6-H-2-Ar source. Zirconium tetrachloride (ZrCl4) powder carrier was especially made to control accurately the flow rate. The microstructure of ZrC/C composite coating was studied using analytical techniques. ZrC/C coating shows same morphology as pyrolytic carbon. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) shows ZrC grains with size of 10-50 nm embed in turbostratic carbon. The formation mechanism is that the growth of ZrC crystals was inhibited by surrounding pyrolytic carbon and kept as nano-particles. Fracture morphologies imply good combination between coating and substrate. The ZrC crystals have stoichiometric proportion near 1, with good crystalline but no clear preferred orientation while pyrolytic carbon is amorphous. The heating-up oxidation of ZrC/C coating shows 11.58 wt.% loss. It can be calculated that the coating consists of 74.04 wt.% ZrC and 25.96 wt.% pyrolytic carbon. The average density of the composite coating is 5.892 g/cm(3) by Archimedes' principle. Crown Copyright (C) 2009 Published by Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.