The simulations of fluid flows in complex geometries require the generation of body-fitted meshes which are difficult to create.The penalty method developed in this work is useful to simplify the mesh generation task.The governing equations of fluid flow are discretized using a finite volume method on an unfitted mesh.The immersed boundary conditions are taken into account through a penalty term added to the governing equations.We are interested in the approximation of the penalty term using a finite volume discretization with collocated and staggered grid.The penalty method is second-order spatial accurate for Poisson and Navier-Stokes equations.Finally, simulations of turbulent flows around a cylinder at Re=3900 and turbulent motions in a rod bundle at Re=9500 are performed.