In an earlier paper, Zienkiewicz and Codina (Int. j. numer. methods fluids, 20, 869–885 (1995)) presented a general algorithm for the solution of both compressible and incompressible Navier–Stokes equations. The algorithm, based on operator splitting, permits arbitrary interpolation functions to be used while avoiding the Babŭska–Brezzi restriction. In addition, its characteristic based approach introduces a form of rational dissipation. Zienkiewicz et al. (Int. j. numer. methods fluids, 20, 887–913 (1995)) presented the application of this algorithm in its fully explicit form to various inviscid compressible flow problems. They also presented two incompressible flow problems solved by the fully explicit form, employing a pseudo compressibility. The present work deals with the application of the above algorithm it its semi‐implicit form to some incompressible flow benchmark problems. Further, it extends the methodology to turbulent flows by employing both one, and two equation turbulence models. A comparison of results with earlier investigations is presented. Other issues addressed in this study include the effect of additional diffusion terms present in the scheme for both laminar and turbulent flow problems and some practical difficulties associated with local time stepping
