Analysis of Non-Conformity in Flexible Pipe through Data Mining from Image Bank

To make possible the exploration of oil and natural gas in maritime waters, it is necessary to develop high technology to support the projects of drilling and exploration of submarine wells. One of the equipment that enables offshore exploration is the flexible pipes. Considering the high cost and complexity of the flexible pipe manufacturing process, the objective of this work is to analyze the effect of the occurrence of whitening stress identified as bleaching observed in the polymeric material known as Polyfluoride of Vinylidene (PVDF), which is used in the manufacture of inner liner layers in flexible pipes. The proposed methodology is to develop a prediction model based on classification, which evaluates the whitening bleaching by extracting knowledge from an image database. Through the proposed methodology, the most relevant parameters associated with the study problem that can define classification rules areidentified. As a result, some relationships between some characters, fruits of image data extraction and product characteristics were identified through decision trees. The conclusion is that these relationships provides support for decision making when peformed by a domain expert.