The reverse osmosis (RO) process has become one of the prominent membrane-based technologies for water desalination to meet the demand for fresh water. This paper presents the results of simulations of the RO desalination process based on simplified functional-decomposition approach-based modelling to understand the process dynamics. The simulation model was validated by comparing the transient behaviour predicted by the model with experimental data from an industrial seawater desalination process. The proposed work was carried out using the Control Design and Simulation (CDSim) toolkit in the LabVIEW 2011 environment. The simulation analysis showed that the specific energy consumption of the RO system could be reduced at different fractional recovery rate by maintaining a reasonably high feed temperature. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.