Abstract: As vibration-based structural damage detection methods are easily affected by environmental noise, a new statistic-based noise analysis method is proposed together with the Monte Carlo technique to investigate the influence of experimental noise of modal data on sensitivity-based damage detection methods. Different from the commonly used random perturbation technique, the proposed technique is deduced directly by Moore-Penrose generalized inverse of the sensitivity matrix, which does not only make the analysis process more efficient but also can analyze the influence of noise on both frequencies and mode shapes for three commonly used sensitivity-based damage detection methods in a similar way. A one-story portal frame is adopted to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed noise analysis technique.

Key words: statistic-based noise analysis, damage detection, Monte Carlo technique, perturbation technique