The design of safe heat flux control devices is fundamental for the success of a space mission that involves atmospheric re-entry. The development of the superconductive coil technology in recent years allows the exploitation of magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) effects as thermal protection system. Thus, experimental and numerical campaigns to assess these effects are needed, in order to provide a proven scientific base for future works in this field. Experiments involving a simplified test case with an argon plasma flow with different magnets configurations have been carried out in the plasma wind tunnel PWK1 at the Institute of Space Systems (IRS). The optical and emission spectroscopy measurements have shown that the magnetic field increases the emissions of the ionized argon particles and the shock stand-off distance. The test conditions have been emulated at the Center of Astrophysics, Space Physics and Engineering Research (CASPER) and a particle tracking technique was used to obtain an electric field force map. This experiment has shown that the electric field induced in the plasma by the applied magnetic field is strong enough to transport the ions towards to cusp region, in accordance with the highest emission intensity detected at IRS. The test case has been rebuilt with the IRS in-house code Self and Applied Field MPD thruster algorithm (SAMSA) and the numerical results have been validated against the experimental results. Further simulations with highest magnetic flux densities have been performed and a polynomial describing the behaviour of the shock distance has been obtained.