The occurrence of traveling shock waves associated to the sudden opening or closing of a valve, known as the hammer effect, is important from the perspective of control design because it imposes an upper bound constraint on the maximum bandwidth achievable for the controlled system. This article addresses the problem of characterizing hydraulic hammer effect of the heating fluid in a solar power tower. The transfer function that relates the increments of the pressure inside the pipe and the fluid velocity is computed, as well as its poles and zeros. In this way, it is possible to obtain finite dimensional linear approximations for this transfer function with a prescribed complexity. As an application, the traveling waves of pressure and velocity of a fluid used for temperature control in a typical solar tower circuit are simulated. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.