## 1 Introduction  
The semiconductor aluminum antimonide is an intermetallic alloy compound and is known because of its high band gap energy. Both aluminum and antimony are abundant on the earth's crust and are known as eco-friendly materials. The semiconductor has a large band gap of 1.69 eV and the nature of the band gap is indirect [1]. Consequently, there has not been much interest in it in terms of thermoelectric properties. This work, for the first time, assesses the possibility of the semiconductor for use in a thermoelectric device. The constituents of the compound are also very cheap in comparison to the thermoelectric devices in study today. The largest problem in the study of the thermoelectric properties of AlSb is the synthesis of a bulk single-phase alloy. Aluminum is a very reactive metal and gets readily oxidized in air to form aluminum (III) oxide. Antimony, on the other hand, has a high vapor pressure and tends to escape from its surface in any physical form. AlSb is a line compound, meaning any change in stoichiometry can result in remnant elements remaining in the alloy, thus disrupting the formation of a single phase [2]. Owing to this, the synthesis of bulk AlSb has proven to be very difficult in the past. Mechanical alloying (MA) has been used in the past to synthesize the intermetallic compound, but not much success has been achieved in terms of obtaining a single phase [3; 4; 5; 6; 7; 8]. This could be largely due to the reasons stated above. [PERSON] et al. showed in their work that as milled powders show an excess of antimony alongside the AlSb synthesized [4]. This could be because aluminum is a very ductile material and can get stuck on the wall of the vial and balls, resulting in a change of stoichiometry of the vial constituents. On the other hand, casting is a very basic method, but it always has the possibility of oxidation of aluminum and sublimation of antimony particles. To avoid oxidation, [PERSON] et al. used the vacuum arc melting method to melt and synthesize the alloy, but the 50-50 at % composition showed an excess of aluminum [8]. So, after adding three at % excess of Sb to compensate for antimony sublimation, they succeeded in giving single-phase AlSb. In this work, melting was done in a controlled atmosphere of argon gas. Being an intermetallic compound, AlSb is very brittle in nature, and so, in order to be used or tested for thermoelectric applications, they need to be compacted. Another problem associated with melting is the uneven morphology within the solid structure. In order to prevent that and facilitate energy conversion use, powder metallurgy steps like pulverizing and sintering by a vacuum hot press could be effective. AlSb has been extensively studied as an anode material for Li-ion batteries, but they have not been studied as a potential thermoelectric material in the bulk form before. Thermoelectric property of a material system is the efficiency of the system to convert heat into electricity. With much potential in the future, research in the field of thermoelectricity is inspired by the huge amount of energy wasted during all and any industrial processes. Thermoelectric properties are measured and understood by a dimensionless figure of merit called ZT [9]. The higher the value of ZT is, the better the thermoelectric property. ZT is defined by the following equation:  
\[\text{ZT}=\frac{\text{S}^{2}\sigma}{\kappa}\text{T} \tag{1}\]  
where S is the Seebeck coefficient, \(\sigma\) is the electrical conductivity, \(\tau\) is the total thermal conductivity and T is the absolute temperature. Increasing the value of ZT is more complicated than it looks from Equation (1). Seebeck coefficient and electrical conductivity, both directly proportional to ZT, are related to one another by the carrier concentration of the material. The higher the carrier concentration, the higher the electrical conductivity and the lower the Seebeck coefficient. So, an optimum value for S and \(\sigma\) are needed to give a high ZT value.