With the SV08 Max having such a large bed, it can take more power to heat it. So, I’m wondering if instead of just having one big bed heater, there could be a grid of heaters, which only heat up the sections of the bed that are actually being used for the print, like how the Prusa XL does it.
I don’t know if Sovol experimented with zone heating but it seems to me with a 8mm thick aluminum plate that heat conduction would make “zone heating” not verry effective.
Also kipper would allow multiple heaters EXCEPT the PID values need to be determined for each heater in every heater configuration. A macro could be written but factor in multiple target temperatures and things get messy fast.
No idea how Prusa handles it.
The 1300 watt heated bed on the SV08 Max is a space heater using a lot of energy and heating the room. It’s on the edge of tripping breakers where there is 120 VAC service and should probably have its own dedicated branch circuit. An enclosure is needed not only to passively heat the SV08 Max build chamber, but also to prevent the SV08 Max from wasting a lot of energy and overheating the room on longer prints. That’s why I’d mostly consider such a large format printer to be best for PLA and TPU which have relatively low bed temperatures.
That’s one of the things I’m liking about the Zero. It’s a small printer that’s fully enclosed so it passively heats the chamber quickly and it’s not heating up my office. It prints ABS-CF beautifully, without using much electrical power.
My Elegoo Neptune 4 Pro had a divided heated bed, with an inner 100x100 mm section (as best I can recall) and the second zone all around that for the rest of the bed. In practice, no slicer supported this hardware feature and it wasn’t used but it did make the printer more complex to use with no real benefit.
I think the best implementation on the SV08 Max would be for the printer to analyze the first layer of the G code and only heat that area of the bed, in a similar manner to only scanning a bed mesh under the part, but that would take a lot of complicated and expensive heated bed zone control. As cardoc mentioned, there would still be a lot of heat creep into the rest of the bed as an 8 mm thick aluminum bed is, by design, a good thermal conductor. A segmented heated bed would need thermally isolated heat blocks with the heat from below only spread across the steel PEI coated build plate.