In recent years, metamaterials for the applications in low-frequency vibration suppression and noise reduction have attracted numerous research interests. This paper proposes a metamaterial system with local resonators from adjunct unit cells coupled by negative stiffness springs. Frist, a lumped parameter model of the system is developed, and a stability criterion is derived. The band structure of the infinite lattice model is calculated. The result reveals the appearance of extra band gaps in the proposed metamaterial. A parametric study shows that the first extra band gap can be tuned to ultralow frequency by controlling the negative stiffness of the coupling springs. A transmittance analysis of the finite lattice model verifies the predictions obtained from the band structure analysis. Subsequently, the work is extended to a distributed parameter metamaterial beam model with the proposed configuration of coupled local resonators. The stability analysis shows that the infinitely long metamaterial beam becomes unstable as long as the stiffness of the coupling spring becomes negative. For the finitely long metamaterial beam, the stability could be achieved for negative coupling springs of given stiffnesses. The effects of the number of cells and the lattice constant on the system stability are investigated. The transmittance of the finitely long metamaterial beam is calculated. The result shows that due to the restriction on the tunability of negative stiffness for the proposed metamaterial beam, a quasistatic vibration suppression region can only be achieved when the number of cells is small.
