Actually, I'm not sure whether I've understood what exactly you mean and besides, I don't know why fluids may be helpful to this effect.
If the effect you wanner achieve is that one particle spilts into two particles, and two spilt into four, and ..., which is similar to L-system, it's actually tangible in Maya. But of course you have to do some scripting(we always have to turn to mel if you want to get complex and high controllable effects).
We usually do it by emit particles from particles and control the per-particle emission rate by expression. And if you want to limit the times of emission, you can set a custom attribute as a trigger to mult the emission rate when it reaches a threshold. Or you can just kill the emitter particle after emission.
You can check some tutorials on the net about how to set a firework simulation in Maya, it's actually the same technique.
My method here is to use the emit command in particle expression and add particles into the particle system manually. It's not a usual way, but you can get all the effect whinin one particle system.
Well I can't insert my picture here to show you the result, so I just past my expression below, you can try it by yourself:
On Creation--
particleShape1.birthTrigger = 0;
particleShape1.rgbPP = <>;
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Run after Dynamics--
vector $curPos = particleShape1.position;
int $count = 2;
int $i;
if((abs(particleShape1.finalLifespanPP - particleShape1.age) <= 1) && (particleShape1.birthTrigger < 1)){
for($i = 0; $i < $count; $i++){
vector $dir = sphrand(1);
emit -o "particle1" -pos ($curPos.x) ($curPos.y) ($curPos.z)
-attribute velocity
-vv ($dir.x) 0 ($dir.z)
-attribute rgbPP
-vv 0 0 1;
}
particleShape1.birthTrigger = 1;
}
The birthTrigger is just a custom attribute to indicate that the particle has emitted new particles and the rgbPP I set here is used to distinguish the old particles of new ones.