In this paper, a unified approach for studying block-structured fluid models is proposed by means of the RG-factorization. When the stochastic environment (or background) is assumed to be a quasi-birth-and death (QBD) process, with either infinitely many levels or finitely many levels, the Laplace transform for the stationary probability distribution of the buffer content is expressed in terms of the R-measure. At the same time, the Laplace-Stieltjes transforms for both the conditional distribution and the conditional mean of a first passage time in such a fluid queue are derived by the same approach.