The objective of this paper is detecting the location and extent of structural damage from measured vibration test data based on direct structural finite element model updating. The method is based upon a mathematical model representing the undamaged vibrating structure and a local description of the damage and introduces a new finite element model updating approach for damage detection. The problem of modeling errors and their influence to damage localization accuracy is discussed and an approach to obtain reliable results in this case is presented. The concept of direct updating of individual dynamic parameters is used and according to that algorithms the mathematical function for damage assessment are defined. Then, error matrix of dynamic properties of healthy and damaged structures is established to detect the damage location and severity. For validation of damage detection approaches, two numerical examples are utilized. At the all examples, consider the modal data are incomplete and inverse of rectangular matrices is accomplished by Moore–Penrose inverse matrix without using any multipliers. It will be shown that the proposed procedure is simple to implement and may be useful for structural damage identification.

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