Abstract. We study the initial-boundary value problem for a nonlinear wave equation given bywhere η ≥ 0, q ≥ 2 are given constants and u 0 , u 1 , g, k, f are given functions.In this paper, we consider two main parts. In Part 1, under a certain local Lipschitzian condition on f with (e u 0 , ea global existence and uniqueness theorem is proved. The proof is based on the paper [10] associated to a contraction mapping theorem and standard arguments of density. In Part 2, the asymptotic behavior of the solution u as t → +∞ is studied, under more restrictive conditions, namelye σt F (t) 2 dt < +∞, with σ > 0, and (e u 0 , e, and some others ( · denotes the L 2 (0, 1) norm). It is proved that under these conditions, a unique solution u(t) exists on R + such that u / (t) + ux(t) decay exponentially to 0 as t → +∞. Finally, we present some numerical results.