AbstractIn low‐Mach number flows the time‐integration is usually bounded by the stability of the acoustic fluxes. This poses a restriction to the maximum timestep. Integration of all fluxes on this time‐scale, leads to huge cpu times. To decrease this problem a timestep splitting technique has been developed by which the acoustic, convective and diffusive fluxes are treated separately. The integration of each of the fluxes is bounded by their separate stability criteria. As an example, the time‐integration technique will be applied to a temporally developing mixing layer. The results show that the proposed splitted integration technique, applied at a Mach number of 0.2, reduces the cpu time by about a factor three. Furthermore, it will be shown that the technique may also be applied at low (0.05) Mach number flows. Here, the cpu‐reduction reaches its maximum of about a factor of four. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.