A fully nunlinear numerical wave tank (NWT) has been simulated by use of a three dimensional higher order boundary element method (HOBEM) in the time domain. Within the frame of potential flow and the adoption of simply Rankine source, the resulting boundary integral equation is repeatedly solved at each time step and the fully nonlinear free surface boundary conditions are integrated with time to update its position and boundary values. A smooth technique is also adopted in order to eliminate the possible saw tooth numerical instabilities. The incident wave at the uptank is given as theoretical wave in this paper. The outgoing waves are absorbed inside a damping zone by spatially varying artificial damping on the free surface at the wave tank end. The numerical results show that the NWT developed by these ap proaches has a high accuracy and good numerical stability.