The vigorous development of offshore wind energy and dense routes have increased the probability of collision between ships and wind turbines. Based on the nonlinear dynamics theory,the conceptual design of the foam aluminum sandwich structure protection device is proposed. To verify the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed design protection performance,LS-DYNA is used to simulate the collision process of a 3000 t ship and a 5 MW tripod offshore wind turbine. At different ship speeds,the anti-collision performance of the sandwich protection device with the same thickness and different layers was analyzed. The results show that with the same thickness,the 5-layer protective structure has a significant effect on improving the safety of offshore wind turbines,and effectively suppress the dynamic response of the wind turbine tower top. Furthermore the 5-layer anti-collision performance is better than the 3-layer and 4-layer structures. The ship speed is 0. 5 m/s,1 m/s and 2 m/s,the initial kinetic energy absorption ratio of the protective device is 76. 9%,79. 7% and 78. 5%,respectively. In addition,the 5-layer structure has the highest energy absorption ratio. With the increase of ship speed,the damage of the tower is aggravated,and the increase of the absorbed energy is less than that of the initial energy. Under the three speeds,the maximum displacement of the tower top is 80. 8 mm,169. 7 mm,and 375. 5 mm,respectively. The displacement response of the tower top is consistent with the change trend of the ship’s kinetic energy. With the increase of initial kinetic energy,the maximum crashworthiness of the protective device shows a growth trend. The crashworthiness growth rate is smaller than the initial kinetic energy growth rate,and the crashworthiness decreases with the increase in the number of layers of aluminum foam sandwich.