To ensure the safe use of structures, it is essential to develop efficient damage identification techniques. In this paper, a brand-new approach to identifying structural deterioration based on static displacement is proposed. First, the relationship between the displacement variation and the damaged element is derived from the static response equations before and after damage. Subsequently, the optimal achievable displacement variation is defined to determine the damage location in the structure. A progressive elimination strategy is suggested to identify the real damaged parts and weed out the pseudo-damaged elements by measuring the distance between the measured and the best possible displacement variation. After determining the damage location, the corresponding damage extent can be calculated by a system of linear equations. The proposed approach has been tested on a beam structure and truss structure using simulated and experimental data. Compared with the existing static sensitivity method, the suggested method does not result in misjudgment and has higher identification accuracy. It has been demonstrated that the suggested approach is effective at locating and assessing the extent of structural damage.
