Role of quenching method on cooling rate and microstructure of steels: Variations in coolant and its flow arrangement

•A comparative study on boiling quenching of various quenching methods is performed by numerical heat transfer analysis on stainless steel (SUS310S) and confirmed their cooling performance through material characterization of after quenched alloy steel (SNCM439).•The proposed theoretical approximation based on the high Biot number behavior can complement the inverse heat conduction problem (IHCP) solution estimated from the measured temperature distribution.•The cooling effectiveness is in order of water multiple-jet, water forced, water and oil immersion, and the volume fraction of the martensite shows good agreement with the surface cooling rate (e.g., almost 100% martensite phase with the multiple-jet quenching).