Vibration Effects and Mitigation Strategies for In-Transit Additive Manufacturing: A Scoping Review

Additive manufacturing (AM) is increasingly being considered for deployment in dynamic operating environments to enable distributed, on-demand manufacturing closer to the point of need. However, sustained environmental vibration presents challenges to print quality, process stability, and operational reliability, particularly for material-extrusion systems intended for in-transit operation. This scoping review maps evidence on vibration-induced effects, vibration characteristics, and mitigation strategies relevant to in-transit AM using the PRISMA-ScR framework. Systematic searches of Web of Science, ScienceDirect, and IEEE Xplore identified 24 studies for evidence synthesis. Of these, 19 (79.2%) examined externally imposed vibration or motion, while 11 (45.8%) investigated real or simulated operational/dynamic conditions. Vibration-related performance was found to depend on interactions among excitation characteristics, transmission behaviour, AM-system structural dynamics, and manufacturing-process sensitivity rather than excitation magnitude alone. Process stability, surface quality, and dimensional accuracy were the principal reported effects, while passive isolation was comparatively under-represented. No included study investigated sustained AM during realistic wheeled-vehicle operation over terrain. The findings therefore support treating terrestrial in-transit AM as a coupled source–path–receiver problem requiring integrated characterisation of environmental excitation, transmission, printer response, and manufacturing performance to establish system-specific vibration tolerance and mitigation requirements.