The objective of this article is to present a new method for identifying the damage location in a multi-story shear building by direct model updating method. In this regard, structural perturbation matrices should be determined that are directly defined as the discrepancy between mass and stiffness matrices of undamaged and damaged structures. As a result of expanding the dynamic orthogonality conditions, mass and stiffness perturbation matrices are formulated by the initial information of undamaged structures as well as the structure’s modal parameters before and after the occurrence of damages. These matrices cannot easily detect the damage site. Therefore, a more explicit etermination of damage location is performed dividing the amount of change in these matrices’ diagonals by the physical properties of undamaged structure. This modification facilitates the damage localization process and yields precise and preferable results in comparison with applying classical methods such as natural frequencies, mode shapes and structural properties changes. Subsequently, the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed damage detection method are verified numerically and experimentally. For numerical verification of the proposed methods, a six-story shear building is utilized as a discrete system. Then, the experimental verification of proposed methods is conducted detecting the location of damages in a simple laboratory frame. It can be deduced that the proposed damage localization method can reliably detect and also localize the structural damage.

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