MacCormack's explicit time‐marching scheme is used to solve the full Navier–Stokes unsteady, compressible equations for internal flows. The requirement of a very fine grid to capture shock as well as separated flows is circumvented by employing grid clustering. The numerical scheme is applied for axisymmetric as well as two‐dimensional flows. Numerical predictions are compared with experimental data and the qualitative as well as the quantitative agreement is found to be quite satisfactory. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.