Uploaded July 2024 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
Meet our engineers for humanity: New York City loses 16-24% of its water supply every year due to leakage and metering miscalculations and experiences over 400 water main breaks a year. 40% of the city’s pipes are more than 80 years old and the city replaces less than 1% of our pipes every year, which is too slow to keep up with the rate at which they age.
For their senior design project, this team of mechanical engineers developed Thimble to explore water mains in search of leaks, cracks, and corrosion — without disrupting our streets. The breakthrough? Inserting their tethered submersible device through NYC’s fire hydrants to collect video and data. The result? Basically, a small submarine.
This is one in our series featuring senior capstone course projects, also known as “senior design.” A hallmark of a Columbia Engineering education, this year-long project brings together student teams to identify a problem and create an innovative solution or prototype that incorporates the fundamentals of engineering.
Meet our engineers for humanity: New York City loses 16-24% of its water supply every year due to leakage and metering miscalculations and experiences over 400 water main breaks a year. 40% of the city’s pipes are more than 80 years old and the city replaces less than 1% of our pipes every year, which is too slow to keep up with the rate at which they age.
For their senior design project, this team of mechanical engineers developed Thimble to explore water mains in search of leaks, cracks, and corrosion — without disrupting our streets. The breakthrough? Inserting their tethered submersible device through NYC’s fire hydrants to collect video and data. The result? Basically, a small submarine.
This is one in our series featuring senior capstone course projects, also known as “senior design.” A hallmark of a Columbia Engineering education, this year-long project brings together student teams to identify a problem and create an innovative solution or prototype that incorporates the fundamentals of engineering.
