Imre Takacs

Imre Takacs did not start in software, he started in the field. He was born in Hungary and went to work for a research institute in Budapest, where, as he tells it, they send a young engineer out to actually smell the wastewater, not only model it. That order of operations is the whole point of his career, because Imre Takacs then spent about twenty years in Canada contributing to GPS-X and BioWin, two of the simulators the wastewater industry runs on, before he moved to a small village in the south of France called Sigale and, in 2010, founded Dynamita to build a third one.

Imre Takacs is unusually rare in his own field, and he says so plainly: the world of wastewater process modelling is maybe 100 or 200 people, and he does not think anybody else went through the same steps he did. He had the real plant experience first, then helped develop three generations of models (VNP in Hungary in the 80s, GPS-X in the 90s, BioWin in the 2000s), and only then, understanding how this really should be done, started his own company. That sequence, operator then model-builder then founder, is what separates him from a software person who learned the wastewater later.

Imre Takacs built Dynamita's product, SUMO, as a simulation software the company releases yearly, and its trick is that it is open at the level that matters. The software itself is licensed, but the actual process equations are shown to the engineers using it, which counts because a designer has to put his stamp on a plant and take legal responsibility for it. A model, in his framing, only knows what somebody already knew and put into it, so SUMO is built to be inspected and extended, not treated as a black box, and universities and big firms routinely build their own new processes inside it.

Imre Takacs makes the value of modelling concrete in money and energy, not in buzzwords. An engineer can roughly guess how big the aeration blowers need to be, the pumps that push air into the tanks, but a guess carries a margin of around plus-or-minus 20 percent, and an oversized blower then burns too much electricity for the entire life of the plant, which over time costs far more than the equipment did. Run the model first and you shrink that margin and that lifetime energy bill. This is the same instinct behind his most-cited work: his 1991 paper on the clarification-thickening process introduced the double-exponential settling model that one-dimensional clarifier simulations still use, and Water Research later named it one of the ten most influential papers in the journal's first forty years.

Imre Takacs has a one-word answer for where wastewater is going, and it is energy neutrality, treating wastewater not as waste but as a resource, with some plants in the world already generating more electricity than they consume. He situates himself modestly among the field's giants, naming James Barnard and David Jenkins and his friend and business partner Bernhard Wett, and he has kept Dynamita deliberately small, a distributed team of around sixteen people across several countries that, in his words, still wants to have fun and keep it as a friendly little company. The whole portrait, though, comes back to that first instruction: go and smell the wastewater before you model it.

“I think that's really important for all the young people to actually smell the wastewater, not only model it.”

Imre Takacs is, in the end, the operator who became the field's modeller, and then quietly handed everyone else the tools.