“…Solidification/freezing of liquid in porous media can occur in many natural phenomena and engineering systems. Some examples are the freezing of water in soil (Lunardini, 1981), frozen food (Albin et al, 1982), water barrier in construction and mining processes (Sager, 1968), chill casting (M'Hamdi, 2002, slab casting (Meng and Thomas, 2003), liquid metal injection (Del Borrello and Lacoste, 2003), latent-heat thermal-energy storage Solidification of liquid copper (Sasaguchi et al, 1993), laser annealing (Kisdarjono et al, 2003, SLS (Zhang et al, 2000;Chen and Zhang, 2006) and laser drilling (Ganesh et al, 1997a, b). Natural convection plays a significant role in solidification of a superheated fluid in a porous medium (Zhang and Nguyen, 1999).…”