A particle separator using dielectrophoretic force is proposed to enable particle separation that cannot be easily conducted using conventional methods. The proposed separator consists of stacked mesh electrodes to which high frequency AC voltage is applied. In this study, tungsten carbide particles were separated from a mixture with diatomite particles as an example because there is currently a demand for a new method to recover expensive tungsten alloy particles from used diatomite filter media in industries manufacturing super-hard machining tools. Additionally, a simple model to correlate the experimental results is proposed so that the characteristics of the proposed separator, including the influence of voltage-frequency, can be calculated. Moreover, a multistage separation is proposed to achieve a high separation extent. The optimized voltage-frequency and stage number to achieve a targeted fraction can be determined using a diagram of the separation characteristics obtained by this study. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.