The invention relates to a method for monitoring the structural damage of a coke tower based on strain monitoring, and the method is implemented through the following steps of: obtaining a tower wall temperature field and stress distribution finite element model through using ABAQUS finite element software, mainly carrying out stress analysis on five operational phases of the coke tower, and taking the focal point and key point of stress as damage monitoring points; constructing a coke tower structure damage monitoring sensor network by using distributed strain sensors, and carrying out analysis on measured data of the sensors so as to obtain a strain energy change rate matrix, thereby deducing corresponding structure damage degree indexes; taking the ratio of the component of each strain sensor to the component of a reference sensor as a set of components so as to form a target feature vector alpha, taking a situation of whether alpha is changed as a structure damage identification criterion, and carrying out the fast and accurate identification and positioning on the structure damage of the coke tower; and meanwhile, realizing a human-machine interaction function by using a GUI (graphical user interface), displaying the operating state of a system and the parameter information acquired by each monitoring point, and carrying out real-time online monitoring and diagnosis on the structure damage of the coke tower. The method disclosed by the invention has important reference significance on the researches on the aspects of monitoring the structure damages of chemical equipment in the petrochemical industry, power plants and other industries.