AbstractThis paper treats the mathematical derivation of a novel formulation of the Navier–Stokes equation for general non‐orthogonal curvilinear co‐ordinates. The covariant velocity components are solved in this FVM formulation, which leads to the pressure‐velocity coupling becoming relatively easy to handle at the expense of a more complicated expression of the convective and diffusive fluxes. When a velocity component is solved at a point P, the neighbouring velocities are projected in the direction of the velocity component at the point P. Thus the base vectors are changed at the neighbouring points. This renders a simpler expression for the covariant derivatives. Neither the Cristoffel symbol nor its derivatives need be computed. This contributes to the accuracy of the formulation. The procedure of changing the base vectors affects only the convected velocity. The convecting term (dot product of velocity and area) is calculated without any change of the base vectors. The same is true for the operator on the covariant velocity in the diffusion term.It is shown that when using upwind differencing the use of projected velocities gives better results than when curvature effects are included in the source term. The discretized equations are written in a form which enables the use of the tridiagonal matrix algorithm (TDMA). The equations can be solved using either the SIMPLEC or the PISO procedure.Two examples of laminar flows ar