About

Dr. Jay Tu is a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at NC State University. His primary focus is on teaching strong fundamentals in engineering and relating them to real-world problems. At the graduate level, he teaches Principles of Structural Vibration, emphasizing the formulation of vibration problems and their broad applicability beyond mechanical systems, including music and science. He is also preparing to introduce a new course in Precision Laser Material Processing for both graduate students and seniors. At the undergraduate level, Dr. Tu teaches Manufacturing Processes and Analysis for Mechanical Engineering Design, where he reviews major manufacturing processes, their role in solving engineering problems, and how to achieve required tolerances through proper dimensioning. He is fascinated by the role of lasers in engineering, highlighting their operation based on human-made physical phenomena and their applications across various fields, integrating concepts from electrodynamics, mechanics, and thermodynamics. Outside of his academic responsibilities, Dr. Tu enjoys spending time with his family, playing tennis, and engaging in hobbies such as photography, collecting classical cameras, and rebuilding musical instruments based on engineering vibration analysis.

Research topics

• Materials science
• Computer Science
• Geometry
• Composite material
• Nanotechnology
• Mechanical engineering
• Engineering
• Optics
• Metallurgy
• Chemistry
• Physics
• Computational chemistry

Selected publications

• Enhancing surface quality and corrosion resistance of corrugated pipes via magnetic abrasive finishing

  Journal of Manufacturing Processes · 2026-03-17 · 1 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Robust and Efficient Communication in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

  ArXiv.org · 2025-11-14

  preprintOpen access

  Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has made significant strides in enabling coordinated behaviors among autonomous agents. However, most existing approaches assume that communication is instantaneous, reliable, and has unlimited bandwidth; these conditions are rarely met in real-world deployments. This survey systematically reviews recent advances in robust and efficient communication strategies for MARL under realistic constraints, including message perturbations, transmission delays, and limited bandwidth. Furthermore, because the challenges of low-latency reliability, bandwidth-intensive data sharing, and communication-privacy trade-offs are central to practical MARL systems, we focus on three applications involving cooperative autonomous driving, distributed simultaneous localization and mapping, and federated learning. Finally, we identify key open challenges and future research directions, advocating a unified approach that co-designs communication, learning, and robustness to bridge the gap between theoretical MARL models and practical implementations.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Aluminum Submicron Particles-Filled Polymer Fiber Fabry–Pérot Interferometer for Hot-Wire Anemometry

  2025-06-29

  article

  We developed hot-wire-anemometers based on aluminum submicron-particle-filled polymer fiber Fabry–Pérot interferometers, designed to absorb a 980 nm-laser-diode and achieve elevated temperatures. Results demonstrate spectral shifts in response to wind-speed variations, enabling precise airflow measurements.

  PublisherDOI

• HCPO: Hierarchical Conductor-Based Policy Optimization in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

  ArXiv.org · 2025-11-15

  preprintOpen access

  In cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), efficient exploration is crucial for optimizing the performance of joint policy. However, existing methods often update joint policies via independent agent exploration, without coordination among agents, which inherently constrains the expressive capacity and exploration of joint policies. To address this issue, we propose a conductor-based joint policy framework that directly enhances the expressive capacity of joint policies and coordinates exploration. In addition, we develop a Hierarchical Conductor-based Policy Optimization (HCPO) algorithm that instructs policy updates for the conductor and agents in a direction aligned with performance improvement. A rigorous theoretical guarantee further establishes the monotonicity of the joint policy optimization process. By deploying local conductors, HCPO retains centralized training benefits while eliminating inter-agent communication during execution. Finally, we evaluate HCPO on three challenging benchmarks: StarCraftII Multi-agent Challenge, Multi-agent MuJoCo, and Multi-agent Particle Environment. The results indicate that HCPO outperforms competitive MARL baselines regarding cooperative efficiency and stability.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Improving Surface Quality of Corrugated Pipes Using 4-Axis Magnetic Abrasive Finishing Technique: Correlating Surface Roughness, Hydrogen Flow, Immersion

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Exploring Citizenship and Exclusion: The Dynamics of State Power and Administrative Practices

  Journal of Student Research · 2024-08-31

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Citizenship indeed provides a sense of belonging, but as Marshall discusses, it is more than just a feeling—it's a status conferred upon members of a community, ensuring equality among possessors in terms of associated rights and duties. Marshall argues that citizenship comprises civil, political, and social rights, with civil rights guaranteeing individual freedoms, political rights enabling participation in governance, and social rights ensuring economic welfare. The 20th century witnessed a shift towards recognizing social rights, challenging hierarchical class systems, and revealing patterns of exclusion inherent in the evolution of citizenship, particularly affecting marginalized groups and women. Exclusion seems to be the antithesis of citizenship, which is viewed as inclusive. This paper explores the nuanced differences between exclusion, omission, and elimination, examining state practices across different contexts and their implications for marginalized groups. It discusses how state capacity influences the choice of exclusionary strategies and considers the varying impacts of these strategies on social groups. By analyzing cases from Germany, Malaysia, India, Israel, and the UK, the paper provides a comparative study of exclusionary practices and their outcomes, contributing to the theoretical understanding of citizenship and state power.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A novel auto-gaping magnetic pole system for inner surface finishing of non-circular pipes using magnetic abrasive finishing process

  Journal of Magnetism and Magnetic Materials · 2023 · 15 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Materials science
  • Mechanical engineering
  PublisherDOI

• Digital Synthesis of Realistically Clustered Carbon Nanotubes

  C – Journal of Carbon Research · 2022 · 6 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Materials science
  • Nanotechnology
  • Computational chemistry

  A computational approach for creating realistically structured carbon nanotubes is presented to enable more accurate and impactful multi-scale modeling and simulation techniques for nanotube research. Much of the published literature to date involving computational modeling of carbon nanotubes simplifies their structure as being long and straight, and often existing as isolated individual nanotubes. However, imagery of nanotubes has shown over several decades that nanotubes agglomerate together and exhibit looping and curvature due both to inter- and intra-nanotube attraction. The research presented in this paper leverages multi-scale simulations consisting of a simple bead-spring model for initial nanotube relaxation followed by a differential geometry approach to create an atomic representation of carbon nanotubes, and then finalized with molecular dynamics simulations using the Tersoff potential model for carbon that allows dynamic bonding and cleavage. The result is atomically accurate representations of carbon nanotubes that exist as single nanotubes, or as clusters of multiple nanotubes. The presented approach is demonstrated using (5,5) single-walled carbon nanotubes. The synthesized nanotubes are shown to relax into the curving and looping structures observed in transmission or scanning electron microscopy, but also exhibit nano-scale defects due to buckling, crimping, and twisting that are resolved during the molecular dynamics simulations. These features locally compromise the desired strength characteristics of nanotubes and therefore the presented procedure will enable more accurate modeling and simulation of nanotubes in subsequent research by representing them less as the theoretically straight and independent entities, but as realistically imperfect.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Difficult Dynamics Concepts Better Explained

  WORLD SCIENTIFIC eBooks · 2022-05-30

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Laser Spot Welding and Electric Contact Points Using Copper/Single-Walled Carbon Nanotube Nanocomposite Synthesized by Laser Surface Implanting

  Journal of Composites Science · 2021-03-22 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In our previous studies, we have developed a wet process, denoted as laser surface implanting (LSI), to synthesize a copper/single-walled carbon nanotube (Cu–SWCNT) metal nanocomposite. The nanostructure of this Cu–SWCNT composite was shown to contain discernable SWCNT clusters in nanosizes inside the copper matrix. Its hardness could achieve up to three times that of pure copper, verified by micro-hardness and nano-hardness tests. A focus ion beam bombardment test and a plane strain compression test show 2.5 times toughness improvement for the Cu-SWCNT composite. Based on these strength improvements, two potential applications for the Cu-SWCNT nanocomposite are proposed and their feasibilities are verified using specially design test rigs. The first application is related to creating long lasting electric contacts. The result shows that the Cu-SWCNT nanocomposite is highly wear-resistant. The contact area of the simulated electric contacts increases after repeated impact loading, which potentially could lower the contact resistance. The second application is to use the Cu-SWCNT implants as high strength spot weld for joining copper foils. A smaller weld with a higher strength reduces the power requirement of the laser and, consequently, the thermal distortion for higher-dimensional precision. The specially designed test rig for the weld strength characterization is a new contribution, providing a new testing capability for small and non-homogeneous samples not suitable for a standard tensile test machine.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: Quantitative Roundness Design and Quality Assurance for Ultra-Precision Assemblies with Significant Error-Scaling Problems

  NSF · $305k · 2004–2008

Frequent coauthors

• Isamu Miyamoto

  Osaka University

  30 shared

• Etsuji Ohmura

  18 shared

• Takashi Inoue

  National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology

  17 shared

• Mark Gartner

  United States Army

  14 shared

• Kazuhiko Ōno

  Komatsu (Japan)

  13 shared

• James G. Katter

  Caterpillar (United States)

  13 shared

• Kaoru Adachi

  Fujifilm (Japan)

  13 shared

• Anders Wretland

  GKN (Sweden)

  9 shared