This Union County teen designed a floating fix for ‘forever chemicals’ in NC water

What if there were an affordable and sustainable way to get clean water – free of not just pathogens but also manmade “forever chemicals” – to communities that need it the most?

One Union County 15-year-old is determined to create one.

Aadit Krishna is a sophomore at Central Academy of Technology and Arts in Monroe. Last month, he was the only student in North Carolina to be recognized by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration with its “Taking the Pulse of The Planet” Award.

The honor has been given since 2005 to students from around the country at the organization’s yearly Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair for exceptional projects focused on ocean, coastal, Great Lakes, weather and climate sciences.

Krishna won for his invention of HelioPure – a system that uses solar power to remove contaminants. It’s designed to float atop rivers, lakes or ponds that many communities are built around, including his family’s village of Tirunelveli in south India.

“The thing I saw in the village was, when I was offered water, they simply collect it from a water body, boil it and give it to you,” Krishna said. “And, what I realized later on was that boiling simply does not remove any actual chemical; it just destroys pathogens and kills anything living.”

That means that other things in the water, like heavy metals or chemicals, remain in it. Krishna decided to design a system that would remove other contaminants and be practically usable by the communities who may not have access to water treatment facilities.

“Many villages like mine have this one central water body that they build the homes around, and they use it for everything: drinking, bathing, cooking, cleaning… And, sunlight is a largely untapped resource for filtration,” he told The Charlotte Observer. “So, I thought, ‘What if we make a system that floats on the water?’”

But it was not Krishna’s first time taking home a top honor: he took home first place in the state science fair in 2022, when he was in seventh grade, and placed in the top 300 students nationally.

Krishna has been working on clean water solutions since ninth grade, but in the future, he wants to continue to improve people’s lives through engineering, however that may look.

“I want to be able to see work that I’ve created have an impact on people somewhere, anywhere,” he said. “The light at the end of the tunnel is really: how can I have some sort of impact?”

How did it start?

Krishna came to Kortney Kopchick, an environmental science teacher at his school, freshman year with a question. He was interested in water filtration systems but he wanted to make something that people needed in North Carolina.

But Kopchick was only his teacher for a few days. It became clear early on he needed to be placed in a higher-level science class, she told The Observer.

“He didn’t need to be in honors earth science because he was just way above that,” she said.

Kopchick told Krishna about PFAS – or perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances. They’ve been used in common household items since the 1940s, like nonstick cookware and water-resistant fabrics.

More commonly, they’re referred to as “forever chemicals,” because they’re manmade substances that break down much more slowly than most other chemicals. As a result, they accumulate in soil, water and, yes, human bodies. They’re associated with negative long-term health effects, including increased cholesterol, liver problems, certain cancers and fertility issues.

Boiling water may kill pathogens, but it does nothing to remove PFAS.

Why Krishna’s project matters in NC

There’s a high concentration of PFAS in the waters off the shores of Wilmington, due to years of industrial discharge into the Cape Fear River by Chemours, formerly known as DuPont. The river flows from tributaries in the Greensboro area to the Atlantic Ocean.

In 2016, NC State and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency researchers found high concentrations of several PFAS in Wilmington residents’ drinking water. Meanwhile, a Chemours chemical facility upstream on the Cape Fear River in Fayetteville had been releasing PFAS into the city’s primary drinking water source since 1980, researchers found.

In August, Chemours submitted a revised permit application to the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, seeking to increase the Fayetteville plant’s production of vinyl ethers, which include PFAS.

An estimated 97-99% of people in the U.S. have measurable levels of PFAS in their blood, according to 2024 data from the Centers for Disease Control.

“I spent months and months researching, seeing what I could do to address PFAS. I watched videos about the Cape Fear River Basin, about UNC researchers who were showing how they’re using different treatment systems to remove PFAs from water,” Krishna said. “And then I thought, ‘We have the systems here, but people all over the world, a lot of them have no defense against this environmental crisis.’”

While not every community can support the infrastructure for an industrial system, Krishna said smaller, at-home systems also have limitations.

“What really struck me was that household systems simply transfer contaminants to another filter medium instead of removing them entirely,” Krishna said.

He wanted his system to remove contaminants completely.

He set out building his first design, composed of three stages of filtration, which he referred to as PuriFAS. After several iterations, it successfully removed 93% of PFAs. Eventually, he’d decide to make a floating version, powered by the sun, which is how HelioPure came to be.

Krishna credits Kopchick as a mentor and for setting him on his path. Kopchick, on the other hand, said it’s all Krishna.

“He wanted something different, a little bit more meaningful, something that hasn’t been done before, and that’s when I told him about PFAS…I just gave him a little piece of information,” she said. “I’m just so proud and in awe of what he’s accomplished.”

What’s next

Krishna is slated to enter HelioPure in several research competitions later this year. He’s also going to present his work at a conference at Elon University later this month, since he placed 2nd in the 2026 NC Student Academy of Science Competition.

Eventually, he dreams of going to Massachusetts Institute of Technology and getting his driver’s license. (Krishna’s got something of a passion for cars. His dream car is the Porsche 911 GT3 Touring, in green.)

Research has become a common path students use to get ahead in the competitive college admissions market, Krishna said, but for him it’s always been about making a difference.

“It’s so competitive, and now, people are just, I think, forcing themselves to do research when they’re not interested in it. I feel like, if you actually care about something, you can do more than just trying to force yourself,” he said. “I want to be able to engineer systems that people can use and that have an impact.”