Flanders Maritime Laboratory is a 2-in-1 complex that houses a big towing tank and a wave tank.

At Flanders Hydraulics Research in Antwerp, the accessibility of the Flemish sea harbours is being studied by using ship maneuvering simulators. The towing tank at Flanders Hydraulics Research dates from 1992 and was built to test ships up to 200 meters in length. Today, there are ships up to 400 meters in length that pass through our harbours, so the scale models used in these experiments increase as well. The new towing tank is 174 meters long, 20 meters wide and is filled with 1 meter of water. This allows for maneuvering tests with scale models up to 8 meters in length, twice as long as the current installation in Antwerp, making the test results a lot more accurate.