What does it take to stop all those moving objects around you?

Visualize speeding objects coming to a complete stop right in front of you with freeze-frame clarity that makes you want to reach out and touch it – BUT DON’T!

In the fast-paced constantly moving Material Manufacturing, Printing & Converting industries, the way to visualize a specific, repeated, moment in a cycle is captured by a strobe flash and perceived by mankind’s persistence of vision. The illusion created by stroboscopic flashes is mesmerizing, and people can be drawn to them, but when you are working with industrial machinery, strobes need to be respected like many other powerful tools.

Monarch Instrument has been designing and manufacturing Industrial Grade Stroboscopes for over thirty-five years. With the release of the illumiNova® fixed mounted strobe, Monarch has combined: the latest LED technologies, the demand for faster production speeds, and the requirements for more elaborate illumination techniques. These are to address flexible packaging laminated substrates, UV.EB cured-ink press speeds, and precision sorting and converting processes. Whether it’s utilized for operator spot-checking or with integrated camera vision systems, the illumiNova’s interface and sophisticated strobe features are easily implemented for these ever-changing production environments.

Transition

Based upon customer feedback and the years of service that customers have enjoyed the Nova-Strobe™ and Nova-Pro® strobe technologies, Monarch has added application-specific features for the fixed-mounted illumiNova® to address the unique requirement of the Flexible Packaging and Converting industries. Utilizing flash rates up to 1 million/minute and pulse widths of 0.001 ms, this stroboscope can freeze-frame virtually any moving object. Equipped with TTL input & output connectors, it is ready for Vision Systems, data recorders, and a full range of encoders and sensing triggers. The illumiNova® platform was designed for simple synchronization between multiple strobes. It easily creates Bright Field, Dark Field, Cross lighting and Backlit flash visualization for inspection stations challenged with transparent materials, textured surfaces, and die-cut or embossed substrates.

Engineered brilliance

The illumiNova provides a brilliant 6200K° white swath of homogeneous stroboscopic light, free of hot or dark spots, and is shaped by your choice of UV stabilized optical grade polycarbonate lenses which collimate the hundreds of LED light chips into the perfect targeted illumination that eliminates peripheral light bleeding. The quick-set brightness adjustment makes it possible to compensate for bright or dark ambient light conditions, highly reflective materials, and the compounded effect of multiple synchronized strobes flashing at the same target.

The illumiNova® is designed for specific industrial applications where it is deployed. The 6-inch iNOVA™ model is useful for Camera Vision and sortation systems where 10” to 14” of illumination is useful in a confined area. IllumiNova’s are available in twelve-inch incremental lengths from one foot (model 100) to eight feet (model 800), whereby models 200 and 400 are popular for converting presses, die cutters, digital labels, and spoolers, and the larger 600 to 800 models for Slitters/Rewinders, laminators and full-web material inspections.

The illumiNova® housing encompasses a standard 80/20 styled T-slot channel throughout three sides of its frame for convenience and durability making mounting, securing, and repositioning the strobe easy and safe. Smaller units can take advantage of standard quarter-twenty tripod and swivel mounting hardware.

Each illumiNova® operates by an integral 11cm x 11cm controller positioned at the end of its beam, or you can use an optional remote controller interface which keeps you safely away from high-speed, heavy moving equipment. The bright LCD display, with its large characters and high contrast backlighting, makes it easy to see in manufacturing environments. Flash rates and rotational speed settings can be: 1) dialed in with the rotary knob, 2) set by push button navigational arrows, or
3) adjusted on-screen with the capacitive touch screen. Advanced feature options are easy to navigate with the rotary knob, and the non-volatile memory saves and quickly recalls the flash and speed settings you need for a variety of jobs.

Control features

Applications of printing, converting, and slitting that include varying frequencies in repeat patterns across the web will appreciate the “Repeat Feature” which instantaneously calculates the speed, frequency, and flash rate that is necessary to freeze a pattern in time allowing you to dial between repeats, jumping from 5-up to 7-up to 3-up, or any number, during your inspections.

The “Time Delay” feature allows the operator to define a flash sequence to follow a precise triggering input, capturing that delayed point in the production flow. This is specifically useful for objects that arrive at irregular time intervals due to sortation or the divergent spacing of shingled materials on a conveyor belt.

“Phase Delay”, which has been a staple for industries that rely on tachometers and repetitious motion, such as revolutions per minute, now provides freeze-frame visualizations that can be accurately advanced/declined in degrees of motion. Printers and label manufacturers find this valuable to look at a specific impression, in a set of repeats, so they know for certain if they are inspecting the first, second, third or any specific position on a linearly moving web.

The “2X multiplier / divide by 2” feature, originally implemented for tachometer frequency harmonics, is useful when web speeds and periodic imaging is too slow or falls within a visually annoying flash range. With a simple button push you can double or quadruple the flash rate instantaneously.

The “Scale” feature helps you automatically switch between rotational measurands (Degrees of Rotation, Revolutions/Min., Revolutions/Sec.) to Linear speeds, time, and distance traveled (Feet/Sec., Milliseconds, Meters/Sec.,) with the illumiNova® doing all the calculations for you. This can be particularly valuable with spooled materials of varying diameters, linear travel, revolutions per minute, and calculation of flash rates.

Monarch Instrument provides sensors to synchronize your manufacturing process with strobes, data recorders and tachometers. The illumiNova® has an array of remote sensors to choose from which include but are not limited to Laser light, LED, and Infrared optical. Also consider Magnetic, Hall Effects, and Proximity sensors with pre-scaling managed by the illumiNova® controller.

UV and IR LED options

In addition to ultraviolet illumination for secure printing, specialty inks and UV substrate applications, Monarch Instrument now supports Life Sciences and research engineers with infrared technologies for a variety of moving object analysis projects. As LED technologies expand into other illumination wavelengths, improve in brightness and durability, and develop commoditized pricing, Monarch will continue to bring these benefits to products and customers.

More than an on-press quality control tool, Monarch Instrument stroboscopes have been used in the Predictive Maintenance industry for more than 30 years. Anything that rotates, reciprocates, vibrates, or produces a repetitive pattern can be captured in time and place using a Monarch strobe. For example, a signal from a vibration analyzer can be plugged into the strobe input to automatically synchronize the flash rate and create stunning stop-motion and slow-motion virtual RPM imagery. Monarch Instrument continues to bring new innovations to visualize, analyze and measure for the inspection, maintenance, and motion research industries.