This study focuses on designing and validating a novel negative stiffness cylindrical metamaterial (NSCM), which is driven by the synergistic interaction between compression–torsion metamaterial (CTM) and curved beams. The proposed NSCM exhibits two salient mechanical characteristics that originate from the tailored design of its deformable unit cells: controllable compression–torsion deformation and stable negative stiffness behavior. The NSCM comprises CTM, an array of circumferentially arranged curved beams, and an annular outer frame. It achieves negative stiffness through “compression–torsion‐curved beam” coupling. The emergence of negative stiffness is conclusively demonstrated through both finite element analysis (FEA) and uniaxial compression experiments (EXP), with strong agreement between FEA and EXP results. Furthermore, a systematic parametric study is conducted to evaluate the influence of key geometric variables on the overall mechanical response, such as the dimensionless parameter ( K ), curved beam height ( h ), axial height ( H ), and misalignment angle ( α ). These investigations have clarified underlying performance regulation trends and established feasible design boundaries for each parameter. The findings offer theoretical insights and practical design guidelines for the application of negative stiffness metamaterials in engineering contexts, highlighting the potential of such mechanical metamaterials in complex functional scenarios.
Zhang et al. (Sun,) studied this question.