Determining the mechanism behind the current cosmic acceleration constitutes a major question nowadays in theoretical physics. If the dark energy route is taken, this problem may potentially bring to light new insights not only in Cosmology but also in high energy physics theories. Following this approach, we explore in this paper some cosmological consequences of a new time-dependent parameterization for the dark energy equation of state (EoS), which is a well behaved function of the redshift $z$ over the entire cosmological evolution, i.e., $z\in [-1,\infty)$. This parameterization allows us to divide the parametric plane $(w_0,w_1)$ in defined regions associated to distinct classes of dark energy models that can be confirmed or excluded from a confrontation with current observational data. A statistical analysis involving the most recent observations from type Ia supernovae, baryon acoustic oscillation peak, Cosmic Microwave Background shift parameter and Hubble evolution $H(z)$ is performed to check the observational viability of the EoS parameterization here proposed.

A generalized parametrization $w_{\beta }(z)$ for the dark energy equation of state is proposed and some of its cosmological consequences are investigated. We show that in the limit of the characteristic dimensionless parameter $\beta \to +1$, 0 and $-1$ some well-known equation of state parametrizations are fully recovered whereas for other values of $\beta$ the proposed parametrization admits a wider and new range of cosmological solutions. We also discuss possible constraints on the $w_{\beta }(z)$ parameters from current observational data.