Who We Are

A Letter from Gary Maurer

I didn't invent Surge Busters. Bill Wilson did.

I acquired Liquid Surge Control because I connected with what Bill was trying to do: make the highways safer. Bill spent twenty years as a California Highway Patrol motorcycle officer. In that time, he saw more accidents than most people see in a lifetime, and the worst ones kept coming back to the same kind of truck: tank trucks. More force. More death. More destruction than anything else on the road.

The idea for Surge Busters came to him years after he retired, in a dream. He woke up, went straight to the kitchen table, and started sketching. He didn't have the physics worked out yet. He just knew what the thing was for.

He built a prototype and had it tested at the University of Idaho. The results surprised everyone in the room, Bill included. As it was told to the company's original owner, the professor running the test, Dr. Budwig, then the head of the university's Mechanical Engineering Department, called it "perfect."

The earliest Surge Busters are still in service today, more than twenty years later. I've talked to the owners myself. Those units are still in the tanks, still doing what they were built to do: eliminating surge force.

That's the company I bought into, and that's the standard I hold it to.

Here's the thing most people miss about liquid surge: it's not a driver problem. It's a physics problem. A truck in perfect mechanical condition, driven by someone with twenty years of experience, still generates the same surge force a rookie's truck does. The liquid doesn't know the difference. Newton's laws don't care how long you've been driving.

I've explained the difference between smooth bore tanks, welded baffles, and Surge Busters more times than I can count, to engineers, to fleet owners, to attorneys. It always comes down to the same thing: "the difference is whether the energy is transferred or eliminated. When a surge in a smooth bore tank hits the front of the trailer, that's the point at which all the surge gets transferred to the truck and all the components. If there are welded-in baffles in the tank, each of those baffles takes some of that transfer, so it's not all hitting just the front of the tank. But 100% of it is either left in the tank or transferred. None of it is eliminated. And that's the key distinctive, Surge Busters technology eliminates 96.7%¹ of the energy."

That number isn't ours. It's independent research, University of Idaho, 2004. We didn't pay for it, and we didn't write it. We just built the thing it measured.

I'm not a marketing department. I'm the person who patented it, and answers the phone when a fleet safety director has questions about it. If you're evaluating this for your trucks, I'd rather you call and ask me directly than take a webpage's word for it.

All of us at Liquid Surge Control stand firmly behind Surge Busters, a measured, field-tested product in use for over 20 years. Our patent speaks to its uniqueness, because there is nothing else remotely like its Harmonic Dissonance, its self-cancellation of its own force. All tanks function better (especially non-metal tanks), and all of the associated equipment lasts longer.

Thank you for your interest in Surge Busters. We are here to support you any way we can. Just ask.

United With You In Our Mutual Commitment to Safety.

Gary Maurer
President, Liquid Surge Control, LLC

The Patent

Surge Busters are protected technology, U.S. Patent No. 11,312,568⁴, Medially Stabilized Liquid Surge Suppressor, issued April 26, 2022 to Gary K. Maurer, building on an earlier patent (U.S. 6,945,423) originally issued to Bill Wilson.

The patent's own abstract: a surge suppressor built from flexible longitudinal members joined at each end around a central stabilizing disk, with flow orifices that let liquid pass through and between the members, dissipating the energy of a wave instead of blocking it outright.

View the official patent document, including the USPTO grant certificate, the full abstract, and the original patent drawing.

Mission

Liquid Surge Control, LLC, manufacturer of Surge Busters®, is committed to Safety: Safety for People, for Property, and for the Environment, by providing industry leading Surge Force Reduction products and services for the Liquid Transportation Industry that deliver exceptional value.

Citation Index

The small numbers next to claims throughout this site point to the sources below. Where a figure is our own test or a measured result from a single test, the entry says so.

1. Budwig, R.S. Surge Force Modeling Report. Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Idaho, June 28, 2004. View the report (PDF). Basis for the 96.7% figure: a single tilt-table test, measured fore-to-aft (26,480 lbf without Surge Busters, 860 lbf with them). Applied to other fill levels, liquids, tank sizes, and directions as an assumption.
2. U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. Cargo Tank Roll Stability Study, Final Report, April 30, 2007. View the report (PDF). Table 2-19: 26.5% of tank trucks in fatal crashes rolled over (TIFA data). Section 2.3.4: 71.3% to 94.1% of rollovers, depending on the dataset, involved a tank at least partly loaded (partial defined as 20% to 75% of capacity).
3. 49 CFR §178.345-7, Circumferential reinforcements. Read the regulation. A DOT 406, 407, or 412 cargo tank with a shell thinner than 3/8 inch must be reinforced with bulkheads, baffles, ring stiffeners, or any combination, so that no unreinforced section of shell is longer than 60 inches.
4. U.S. Patent 11,312,568, Medially Stabilized Liquid Surge Suppressor, issued April 26, 2022, building on U.S. Patent 6,945,423. View the patent (PDF).
5. Liquid Surge Control, LLC. G-Force Comparison: a short-term fleet test of two matched 2,800-gallon fuel oil delivery trucks, one with Surge Busters, measured with G-force sensors. View the study (PDF). This is our own test, not an independent one, and both trucks have welded baffles.
6. 49 CFR §571.136, Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard No. 136, Electronic stability control systems for heavy vehicles. Read the standard.
7. Independent Research Library: the published papers behind the physics of liquid slosh and surge, including NASA and university research. Citations checked against their original publication records on September 22, 2026.
8. Zheng, Zhang, Ren, Wei and Song. “Rollover stability analysis of tank vehicles based on the solution of liquid sloshing in partially filled tanks.” Advances in Mechanical Engineering, 2017. Read the paper (open access). Cited on the Rollover Stability page.
9. Rakheja, S., Sankar, S. and Ranganathan, R. “Influence of Tank Design Factors on the Rollover Threshold of Partially Filled Tank Vehicles.” SAE Technical Paper 892480, 1989. View the paper. Cited on the Rollover Stability page.
10. U.S. Department of Transportation. Liquid Cargo Shifting and the Stability of Cargo Tank Trucks, Volume 2: Final Technical Report. View the report. Cited on the Rollover Stability page.
11. HMC Polymers Chemical Resistance Guide, tested to ASTM D543 (1-month immersion). Basis for the polypropylene resistance ratings on the Applications page.
12. WWLP 22News. “CT State Police say rolled fuel tanker was owned by Springfield based Pride subsidiary.” April 16, 2018. Read the report. Reports 2,600 gallons spilled in an Enfield, Connecticut rollover and more than a week of environmental cleanup “at a cost of half a million dollars.” A news report; it does not name the source of the cost figure.
13. NBC Boston. “Tanker Spills 10K Gallons of Diesel Fuel in Revere, Cleanup Could Cost $1 Million.” October 13, 2021. Read the report. About 10,000 gallons of diesel spilled; the cost is an estimate attributed to unnamed “officials,” not a final figure.
14. Liquid Surge Control, LLC product specification: Surge Busters are designed for a 15-year service life. This is the manufacturer's design figure, not an independent test.
15. Liquid Surge Control, LLC calculation. Displacement is the volume of the plastic: unit weight (2.5 lb each for the SB815 and SB807, 8 oz for the SB804) multiplied by the number of units on the Surge Buster Calculation Chart (REV0725) for the tank size and liquid, divided by polypropylene density of about 0.90 g/cm³. Results: SB815 about 1.0% to 1.4%, SB807 about 1.2% to 1.7%, SB804 about 0.7% to 1.5%. Our own calculation, not an independent measurement.

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