Traumatic brain injury (TBI, also called intracranial injury) is a high potential threat to our soldiers. A helmet structural
health monitoring system can be effectively used to study the effects of ballistic/blast events on the helmet and human
skull to prevent soldiers from TBI. However, one of the biggest challenges lies in that the pressure sensor installed inside
the helmet system must be fast enough to capture the blast wave during the transient period. In this paper, an ultrafast
optical fiber sensor is presented to measure the blast signal. The sensor is based on a Fabry-Pérot (FP) interferometeric
principle. An FP cavity is built between the endface of an etched optical fiber tip and the silica thin diaphragm attached
on the end of a multimode optical fiber. The sensor is small enough to be installed in different locations of a helmet to
measure blast pressure simultaneously. Several groups of tests regarding multi-layer blast events were conducted to
evaluate the sensors' performance. The sensors were mounted in different segments of a shock tube side by side with the
reference sensors, to measure a rapidly increasing pressure. The segments of the shock tube were filled with different
media. The results demonstrated that our sensors' responses agreed well with those from the electrical reference sensors.
In addition, the home-made shock tube could provide a good resource to study the propagation of blast event in different
media.
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