## 1 Introduction  
The basic idea of plasma medicine is to create a therapeutic effect based on a chemical rather than a thermal interaction with the living substrate. To do that, plasma medicine tools, through different schemes [1; 2], produce a cold plasma in which the ion branch is kept at room temperature and the temperature increase of the target due to the plasma action is rather small. Such a cold plasma produces, interacting with the air, reactive nitrogen and oxygen species (RONS) which, together with electrons, electric field, UV radiation and metastable species, are considered the main factors responsible for the therapeutic action on biological tissues [3; 4; 5]. The recognized applications, most studied so far in the field of plasma medicine, are the disinfection of bacteria and fungi and decontamination [4; 5; 6; 7; 8; 9; 10], dermatological diseases [11; 12; 13; 14], surface treatment of materials and bio-materials [15; 16; 17; 18], wounds healing [19; 20; 10; 13; 21], blood coagulation [22; 23; 24] and the selective killing of cancer cells [25; 26; 13; 27].  
In the Dielectric Barrier Discharge (DBD) scheme, the one used in the Plasma Coagulation Controller (PCC) [23; 28], plasma is usually produced by applying high voltage pulses at kHz frequencies between two close electrodes, separated by a dielectric layer. This last feature, together with the short duration (from hundreds ns to 1 \(\upmu\)s) of the applied pulses, limits the amount of current flowing along the plasma to the target (and, of course, prevents the formation of an arc discharge). Indeed, reported measured currents on the target are usually of the order of few mA averaged over the entire duty cycle in a way that thermal effects are widely considered negligible.  
However, even though a tentative standardization of the parameters within which plasma sources for bio-medical applications should operate has been proposed [29; 30], a certain degree of variability is still present in the plasma medicine arena in terms of applied power during the treatment and in its relative effect on the living substrate.  
Although the thermal effects induced by biomedical cold plasmas are typically considered negligible, we believe they should be quantified and properly taken into consideration, to be sure of working under such conditions that the plasma has no unwanted consequences. The aim of this work is to focus on the main mechanisms that determine such thermal effects and whether they can be deleterious for application to living matter. In our case, the flexibility of PCC enables a fine tuning of the power coupled to the plasma, making possible an extensive characterization of the thermal component. As it will be shown throughout this paper, this feature makes PCC a suitable plasma source for clinical applications.  
This contribution has two main goals--from one, side we analyze the effect of PCC on biological samples highlighting the presence of thermal effects in specific operational conditions (Section 2); on the other side, we estimate the power delivered by PCC through different bench tests on metallic targets (Section 3). The basic idea behind this analysis is, thus, to clarify in the different PCC operational regimes whether thermal effects take place in the plasma action and which roles they could have.