Polymeric hydrogels are three-dimensional polymer networks containing a large amount of water, which have been used in a variety of applications, e.g., soft contact lenses, absorbents, and cosmetics, due to their high water contents and soft touchness. 1 In particular, a considerable number of researches have been focused on stimuli-responsive hydrogels, in which they can change their properties in response to environmental stimuli such as pH, temperature, ionic strength, and electric field.2,3 The stimuli-responsive hydrogels have been investigated for many biomedical and pharmaceutical applications, e.g., drug delivery system (DDS). 2,3 As familiar examples, it has been reported that the hydrogels composed of poly(N-isopropylacrylamide), poly(N,N-diethylacrylamide), and poly-(ethylene oxide)-poly(propylene oxide) block copolymer have exhibited temperature-response.
2-6On the other hand, the hydrogels had some serious disadvantages such as brittleness and lack of mechanical toughness. So far, to solve these disadvantages of the hydrogels, synthesis of organic-inorganic nanocomposite (hybrid) hydrogels have been reported, 7,8 which are composed of organic polymer as a mainchain and inorganic dispersed clay as a cross-linking agent. A clay has two-dimensional rigid sheet structure forming regular higher-ordered structure (lamellar phase) and can disperse in the water. These properties of the clay would contribute to the superior characteristics such as high mechanical strength, elongation, and transparency of the hydrogels. However, since other inorganic materials, which have rigid structure and dispersion behavior, have hardly ever been known, the variety of the organic-inorganic hybrid hydrogels has been restricted. The availability of new inorganic cross-linking agents promisingly introduces additional development of new functions and applications of novel high-performance hybrid hydrogels.So far, water-soluble polysiloxanes having alkylammonium groups were synthesized by the sol-gel reaction of aminoalkyltrialkoxysilane in strong acid aqueous solution.9,10 In the solid state, these polysiloxanes were stacked to form the hexagonal phase, implying their rigid-rod structures. The polysiloxanes have inspired us to use them for the development of a new hybrid hydrogel, because of their comparable water-dispersibility and rigidity to those of a clay. Accordingly, we prepared a polysiloxane-based multifunctional cross-linking agent for a new organic-inorganic hybrid hydrogel.11 The cross-linking agent was synthesized by reaction of the rigid polysiloxane with acryloyl chloride. Then, the organic-inorgnic hybrid hydrogels were obtained by free-radical polymerization of an acrylamide (AAm) monomer using the cross-linking agent. The compressive properties of the obtained hydrogels were more superior than those of conventional poly(AAm) (PAAm) hydrogels. Based on the backgrounds described above, development of novel temperature-responsive organic-inorganic hybrid hydrogels would be a promising topic in the material rese...