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Many commercial solar thermal power plants rely on indirect thermal storage systems in order to provide a stable and reliable power supply, where the working fluid is commonly thermal oil and the storage fluid is molten salt. The thermal oil - molten salt heat exchanger control strategies, to charge and discharge the thermal storage system, strongly affect the performance of the whole plant. Shell-and-tube heat exchangers are the most common type of heat exchangers used in these facilities. With the aim of developing advanced control strategies accurate and fast dynamic models of shell-and-tube heat exchangers are essential. For this reason, several shell-and-tube heat exchanger models with different degrees of complexity have been studied, analyzed and validated against experimental data from the CIEMAT-PSA molten salt test loop for thermal energy systems facility. Simulation results are compared in …