Challenge
A global manufacturing leader in fluid motion control equipment supplying pumps, valves, and seals needed to upgrade their legacy and latest actuators used in demanding environments like oil & gas, chemical, and water industries at remote locations. These mission-critical systems faced power outages, causing communication loss, blind spots in system health monitoring, delayed diagnostics, costly emergency field service, and safety risks in pressure-sensitive operations.
The customer required a redesigned power backup board to support multiple actuators during outages, providing over 10 minutes of backup power, addressing part obsolescence, and ensuring full compatibility with existing installations. The project scope included prototype development, seamless system integration, comprehensive testing, and production-ready documentation—all within the physical and mechanical constraints of deployed actuator variants, maintaining their form, fit, function, and backward compatibility.
Solution
Quest Global executed a sustenance-oriented hardware redesign that delivered power-independent system status, alarm state and monitoring, enabling complete system diagnostics and safe response procedures.The team:
Designed within strict mechanical constraints, developing a compact solution that fits within the existing enclosure without altering form-fit-function across multiple actuator variants
Modified the PCB layout to meet new space and functional requirements
Migrated designs to the latest EDA tool for standardization
Validated circuit changes for compatibility and streamlined verification
Maintained full backward compatibility with multiple actuator variants
Enabled 12 minutes of power backup
Introduced additional supply voltage monitoring and controls
Conducted board bring-up and functional verification
Developed intelligent power management for line status verification, health transmission, safe shutdown, and auto-recovery
Results – At A Glance
Redesigned board doubled backup time, providing 12 minutes of power to eliminate blind spots and ensure full operation during outages
Enhanced reliability with intelligent power management and advanced monitoring
Resolved component obsolescence with cost-effective, low-complexity alternatives
Maintained revenue streams by ensuring compatibility across both legacy and new actuator variants
Achieved very high customer satisfaction with FTR delivery and seamless production integration
