I wish to calculate the time it takes for steel bars (2 types, 4140 steel and EN30B steel) to crack in a spray quenching tank. Because only the sides of the bar is sprayed, cracking occurs at its ends. Can someone give ideas on how I should go about calculating when cracking will occur from the time the bar is sprayed?

I'm so far using a sequentially coupled implicit FE approach(ABAQUS) which which first calculates the heat transfer followed by a stress analysis. For this approach time is not a parameter. Using the explicit version (5.8) of the code does not contain the thermal stress functionality.

Any advice and/or experiences would be most welcome.
Thank you in advance
Kind Regards,
Dave