About Sam Barros and PowerLabs

 Index:

 ABOUT THIS PAGE:

 "I can see further, for I stand on the shoulders of Giants." --- Sir. Isaac Newton.

    Every aspect of our lives in today's society is in some way, shape or form assisted, improved, or determined by science and technology. Today we live longer because medicine cures our illnesses and assists us in living healthier. We travel further, faster and more often because engineering provides us with the means to do so. We communicate and do business globally because of advancements in electronics. The very fact that I am able to communicate with you this moment has far less to do with my own efforts than it does with the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people who created and maintain this incredibly versatile infrastructure that we have grown to use - internet -.
     For as long as I can remember science has fascinated me in every aspect of it. From sticking a hair pin into an electrical socket at age 3 to find out what was it that came out from that mysterious place that allowed everything in the house to run, breaking my toys apart at age 7 to find out how they worked, to enrolling in an engineering degree so that I can practice science at a professional level, my life has largely been a never ending quest to learn and practice science. Unfortunately individuals with a passion for knowledge such as myself are seldom found: This page is my medium for sharing my ideas and interests with the few who share such interests; And just as I learned and continue to learn much from others before me, I hereby offer people some of my acquired knowledge, hoping that others will also benefit from my work and take it to greater heights than I have been able to. Or at least derive some enjoyment and learn to appreciate some of the things I do.
    I have spent the past 5 years working on and updating this page, also spending thousands of dollars maintaining it online under high bandwidth servers (annual traffic has exceeded one terabyte every year since 2003!). It appears as though finally my efforts are paying off; this page currently receives nearly fifty thousand visitors in a month, and as a result I have been contacted by people from all around the world with comments, suggestions, ideas, and some times even job offers, sponsorships and media attention. The page has been featured on nationally and internationally published newspapers and magazines and I have had the opportunity to showcase some of my research to the world through major television networks. You can read more about the publicity this page has generated under the publicity page.

•  ABOUT ME:

    Everything we have and do today we owe to those who worked before us. We may not live in a perfect world but few would argue that things today aren't any better than they were before. And similarly, I believe that we owe to our antecessors to take their work even further, and make the world we live in even better, through scientific progress. The idea of progress -in whatever aspect of science I happen to work in- is what I want to base my life's works on. My father started off as a cashier at a bank, and over several years worked his way up to becoming the Director of that bank. Once I congratulated him and said that I too hoped some day to achieve the kind of success he had in his professional life. He told me I could not hope for that, because when he began working he started at the bottom working to pay his way through school; when I start my career I will start much further than he started, and as such I have to accomplish much more than he did. And I will. I owe it to everyone who has created the scientific ideas and knowledge which allows me to do the things I do. I owe it to my parents, and, most important of all, I owe it to myself.
    I get up every day to do something new; I have not owned a Television in the past 3 years, and have probably watched less than 50  hours of TV a year in the past 5 years; all my time gets taken up by school and my research projects, with whatever is left being divided between working on my car, practicing sports or spending time with my girlfriend; on a busy day I am more than willing to sacrifice sleep or having a proper meal for a couple more minutes of a pressing activity.

     I was born on February 13th 1982 in Brasilia, the capital of Brazil. Both my parents worked (and still work) for a large Brazilian bank and I spent the first 12 years of my life living in Brasilia, going to a couple different private schools and performing my first experiments ever, mostly in the areas of chemistry and electricity. As a child, and even today, I have always been extremely curious; when I was 3 years old I somehow I managed to get shocked by an electrical outlet and nearly got myself killed... At age 7, I stuck a bent piece of wire into an electric socket and watched in bewilderment as the wire instantly exploded and blackened the wall (and my fingers) around it... I have always been fascinated with electricity, but I think it was at that moment that I started really admiring it. This admiration continues to this day and I am able to spend a night awake just watching a thunderstorm, or spend hours staring at a plasma display... By that age I was also taking apart anything I could get my hands on: toys, electric showers, home appliances, etc... I was fascinated by how everything worked and tried to understand each mechanism involved... I rarely managed to put them back together, instead, I kept their parts for later use... Around that time I started making my own devices too... By age 8 I was already experimenting with electromagnets and electric motors, building simple devices such as doorbell ringers and fans...

     Taking another leap in time I go to the time when I was 11 years old... By then I had obtained my first chemistry set and had started venturing in the realms of chemistry... I had also recently started experimenting more seriously with electricity and electric circuits, etching my own printed circuit boards and building simple electronic devices from plans I found in electronic magazines (which I had been reading for quite some time). It was then that I built my first real high voltage device: An ignition coil driver... Despite only running at 30 watts, it was a pulsed power system, so it could deliver 30Kilovolt pulses of equal energy level to a small stun gun... Of course, it was only a matter of time before I (then inexperienced with high voltage) got myself shocked with it... By that time I was using it to do silly things, like burning insects or lighting fluorescent lamps from a distance, and some of the shocks I received were severe enough to throw me across the room... At one time I was demonstrating the potential lightning could have to power cities with electricity at a science fair: I had a 1-meter squared model of a small city, with houses, lamp posts, and lights everywhere. Over the city there was a cotton cloud with a H.V. wire inside it, to produce the discharge that struck the lightning rod and lit all the lamps in the city.. The cloud was made of cotton, and, sure enough, it caught fire... Unbeknownst to me at the time, fire is an excellent conductor of high voltage electricity, so, when I attempted to put it out, an electric spark leaped to my hand and, by reflex, I jumped back. The people at the science fair got to watch me get shocked, hit my head on the wall, and have my project burn down. I did rebuild the project, and won the science fair, but more importantly I learned a lesson about safety that I remember vividly to this day.
     I was afraid of high voltage for a while after that, but it didn't stop me from experimenting: It simply made me more cautious, and, since that one shock I have rarely ever had any incidents, let alone accidents working with electricity and high voltage.

     That project was one of many I have entered into science fairs since I was 9 years old. At that age I started competing (and winning) on every single science fair I could enter. I saw it as a chance to express myself and meet people interested on my projects, and my parents saw my success as a reason to encourage me and fund my increasingly complex projects. At age 13 my family moved to Holland, and I transferred to the European School of Bergen, in Holland (the place where I learned English, French, Spanish, and some Dutch to complement the Portuguese I already spoke at home, as well as from where had a chance to live in France for some time, and travel almost all of Europe with my parents). From there I continued participating their local science fairs and when I won my second local prize with a pneumatic motor project the school decided to enter me for a Dutch science fair (The Petten Prize). I came first in both years I participated it (one time I came first AND second place with two projects). From there I was given the chance to participate in an European Science fair, the Regional JSHS (Junior Science and Humanities Symposia) in Munich 1998. To my surprise, I came first (laureate) and was automatically entered into two other science fairs: The International JSHS, competing with the first place of every state in the US, plus Europe, where I came third (after having to type my entire presentation on the flight on the way to Phoenix because I lost the original), and the TMR's Young Scientist Of The Year contest (in Porto, Portugal, for both Highschool students and college undergraduates), where, although I didn't make it into the top 3, I still did very well overall. My stand was the busiest one in the whole conventions center (look at the picture below to see why! The smoke is liquid nitrogen, there used to power my prototype engine). 
     I was also invited to Intel's International Science fair (the largest one of it's kind in the world), but it happened at the time I decided to change schools so I could do my International Baccalaureate, and I wasn't able to go (my other school wasn't affiliated to these fairs).
     As my knowledge and skills continued to grow fed by my constant reading of any scientific book or science related magazine I could lay my hands on, and by my constant experimenting which brought new ideas and questions for me to research upon, my experiments began to grow in magnitude. Then (as now), funding became a real problem as I would often have several projects running in parallel and work on them as money and parts became available. One of those projects in 1998 was high efficiency rocket research. It started off with model rockets, and then went onto homebuilt rocket motors. First a small hybrid prototype (bench top, nitrous oxide/rubber), than a larger butane/propane/nitrous oxide engine which produced several mach diamonds on its exhaust and was loud enough to have the windows in the garage shake while it was running over the bench. Then, realizing that my resources would not allow liquid or hybrid engines to be produced light enough for fly, I started experimenting with solid fuelled rocket engines. First sugar/potassium nitrate, than perchlorates, metal powders, nitrocellulose, double base powders, and so on. These extremely small prototypes (usually built around 1cm diameter brass tubes) produced incredible thrust for their size, and with ever increasing performance, I started looking into military rocket patents. It was working with one such high performance missile fuel containing a high explosive combustion rate accelerant, that I suffered my first and last accident whilst working in the lab. An extremely small amount of fuel detonated during testing phase  and cost me my first hospital visit, complete with overnight stay, micro surgery, some nice scars on my hand and a ride to the police station. I was very fortunate not to have lost sight or any limbs and became extremely careful after that, discarding experiments that were too dangerous (I now see that in my younger years I did not make that distinction, and was very fortunate not to have had another, perhaps much more serious accident).

     Of course, while there may not have been any other accidents, there certainly were some close calls! I have hundreds of such anecdotes, about stuff burning, smoking, catching fire, exploding... They would be too many to tell on this page... One I remember particularly well and will share here happened during sulphuric acid production. I needed some acid to etch an aluminum pipe prior to soldering. For that, and for other purposes I decided to filter and concentrate 36% battery acid to 95%+: the batch was boiled for 3 and a half hours until the thermometer read 290C and white fumes were pouring out of the flask and had killed just about all the flies which were permanent residents of the garage during the summer. I, of course, was wearing a long sleeved lab apron with long nitrile gloves, and activated carbon gas mask and polycarbonate goggles. Everything went well throughout the process, until I decided to pour it on the thick glass flask which was rated for acids storage (it had a glass stopper). To my surprise, when half the acid had been poured the flask shattered into pieces and splattered acid all over my coat. Everything happened so fast, but I remember as though it was slow motion. The boiling hot acid hitting the white cotton of the clothes and instantaneously turning it black, the smoke as the acid ate away the concrete floor... I ran for the garden hose stripping off my clothes. I remember a piece came off the labcoat as I tugged it, and most of the front was dissolved by the time I could water it down. I acted quick and didn't have a single drop on my skin: A display of how good planning and proper safety equipment is always worth using. This procedure had been attempted several times before and only this time it went wrong (of course, had I waited for the acid to cool it wouldn't have shattered... But the flask was supposedly rated for this). This incident ended with a comic closure as I ran into the house headed for the shower in my underwear past my family who was having dinner in the kitchen.
 And than there were also the incidents that were just plain stupid, like the day I fired a fuel/oxypropane cannon inside the house and put a tennis ball through my sister's door... My parents never quite trusted me in the house by myself after that one...

     In an attempt not to be boring or overly boastful, I have obviously left a lot out. Still, this outlines some of what I have done. I now continue my work (as you can see on this page) and my studies, hoping to become a professional engineer, and go work at a large company in research and development... For now I can at least say that I am very proud of what I have done so far... There may have been mistakes and incidents, but it was fun, exciting and rewarding, and had I been given the chance, I would do it all again!

    On a more personal note, I have also done five years of Karate, 4 years of Judo, 1 year of Gymnastics. I thoroughly enjoy martial arts for the discipline and focus they give to the body and mind. I was going to get my purple belt by the time I left to Holland, but there I had to stop my lessons and only resumed them recently. I am a big fan of extreme sports, doing mountain biking over summer, snowboarding / skiing in winter and just about anything else when I get the chance (water ski, jet skis, snowmobiles, motorbikes, go karts, etc). I work out every now and then to keep my physique (I am 1m 77 tall and weight 68kilos (5'11 150pounds)) and also to relieve stress. The only team sports I enjoy are Volleyball and frisbee. I am outgoing and absolutely love a good party (I was known on a name basis on several dance clubs in Sao Paulo), but tend sometimes to speak in scientific terms and with a certain indifference which makes many people think of me as being arrogant, which is obviously not true. I do have a big ego though, probably because throughout my life people have been praising me so much for my skills and accomplishments that I took their word for it. I don't however let it make me overconfident so that it doesn't hurt my work; when it comes to my devices, I am usually pessimistic, as the pessimist is never disappointed!

     I currently live in Michigan, USA, and can be seen driving my black Subaru to and from school every day, running around campus back and forth to my classes or busy at work on the machine shops in my University. I can always be reached through my e-mail address: sam@power-labs.com .