Several bivalve species burrow into sandy sediments to reach their living
position. There are many hypotheses concerning the functional morphology of the
bivalve shell for burrowing. Observational studies are limited and often qualitative
and should be complemented by a synthetic approach mimicking the burrowing process
using a robotic emulation. In this paper we present a simple mechatronic set-up to
mimic the burrowing behaviour of bivalves. As environment we used water and quartz
sand contained in a glass tank. Bivalve shells were mathematically modelled on the
computer and then materialized using a 3D printer. The burrowing motion of the shells
was induced by two external linear motors. Preliminary experiments did not expose
any artefacts introduced to the burrowing process by the set-up. We tested effects of
shell size, shape and surface sculpturing on the burrowing performance. Neither the
typical bivalve shape nor surface sculpture did have a clear positive effect on burrowing
depth in the performed experiments. We argue that the presented method is a valid
and promising approach to investigate the functional morphology of bivalve shells and
should be improved and extended in future studies. In contrast to the observation of
living bivalves, our approach offers complete control over the parameters defining shell
morphology and motion pattern. The technical set-up allows the systematic variation
of all parameters to quantify their effects. The major drawback of the built set-up was
that the reliability and significance of the results was limited by the lack of an optimal
technique to standardize the sediment state before experiments