Professor Rebello is Full Professor at the Metallurgy and Materials Department, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He finished his BSc degree in metallurgy and received his Doctoral Degree from the Free University of Brussels in 1970, when he began to work on welding metallurgy and related problems, including the study of the behavior of materials when subjected to varying service conditions, such as fatigue, corrosion, cavitation, etc. After 1990, he started working deeply on nondestructive testing applied to metals and materials, as ceramics and plastics. He is presently the Head of the Nondestructive Testing research group at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

His academic contribution includes teaching undergraduate courses for engineering, master and doctors students, as well as an intensive production of scientific papers. He is the author of more than one hundred and fifty papers, being forty of international level, and the remaining of local interest. He has also been the thesis adviser of one hundred and fifty Master and Doctoral Thesis. Professor Rebello’s academic work has an important connection with industrial demands in Brazil, mainly for the oil and gas area.

Professor Rebello is the Brazilian representative in the World Federation for Non Destructive Evaluation Centers, and in the Standing Committee of the International Workshop on Electromagnetic Nondestructive Evaluation and presently belongs to the International Organizing Committee of several Congress as:
-International Conference on Composite Structures (Portugal)
-Emerging Technologies in NDT (Greece)
-World Conference on Non-Destructive Testing (South Africa)

He has recently edited a EURASIP Special Issue on “Signal Processing in Advanced Nondestructive Materials Inspection”. Professor Rebello is the Conference Chairman of the upcoming 17th International Workshop on Electromagnetic Non Destructive Evaluation, to be held in Rio de Janeiro, June 2012.
 

Abstract

New Challenges for NDT Techniques as Brazil Goes Deeper in Oil Production

In the last five years, Brazilian society has been thrilled with the good news about great discovery of big offshore oil fields, named “pre salt layer”. But, more than only good news about energy and economic impacts, these new significant discoveries also mean giant challenges for engineers, researches and for the scientific community in general. The “pre salt” oil fields are under critical conditions to become technical and economically productive: deep water – around 2.000 meters –, the existing salt layer over the oil fields, and especially high percentage of contaminants present in the oil. This entire context imposes challenges not only for Brazilian industry but also for all international partners involved in offshore oil production.

In order to be successful in overcoming this new frontier of technology, engineers are faced with big problems to be solved, as to select new materials for high pressure, high temperature, moreover exhibiting good resistance to corrosion and fatigue. High quality steels with clad, linear or other internal coating are solutions under evaluation, especially for long subsea pipelines.

The present talk will focus on new developments in NDT techniques, up to now not used in the petroleum industry. These new systems for pipeline inspections should be able to suitably perform under high pressure, high temperature, and inspect multilayered materials. In addition, a brief overview on the Brazilian NDT community will be presented and also a short description of the main research projects under development aiming to face these ultra deepwater oil production challenges.