Fluid "Pallet" Flowitems

L.S.

I am wondering if there are plans for a fluid equivalent of the pallet flowitems. I know you can convert fluids into discrete flowitems but there are situations when transporting a fluid in a similar way as with a pallet, 'loading' it and being able to use the 'use transport' functionality would be a useful extra. (as far as I can oversee now)

What is the situation you are looking to simulate?
I have used a tank inside of a task executer before to simulate a truck or ship filling up. Would that work?

Fluid objects do not use flowitems. In fact, there is really no "material" at all inside of the fluid objects, they simply keep track of their fluid levels with numeric variables and then the graphics can be updated to make it appear as if material is contained within them. A simple description would be to say that fluid objects keep track of the amount of material in them using variables, and the variables are updated on regularly timed "tick" intervals based on the flow rates in and out of the object. This is a slight over-simplification because there are several other factors and constraints involved, but the bottom line is that there are no items inside of the fluid objects.

Brenton has built a few models where he put a fluid tank inside of a discrete transporter to haul "fluid" around the model as is the case with oil tankers and such. Maybe this was where you were headed with your question? If so, contact Brenton and he can give you some guidance.

The situation I am thinking of is a foundry environment where liquid iron is transported and moulds are poured. I already tried some things with using a fluid tank as a ladle and I hope I will find a way to implement this in an easy way without implementing too much code. Another application maybe the mould itself, but with a smart application of the fluid tank as a transport device and some fluid-to-item-combiner combination it should be possible to allow easy model changes I hope.
Ideally (when staying close to reality) it would be nice when a mould would be a 'fluid pallet' which has to be filled with a certain amount of material, but as I understand from your reactions this is not similar to the normal pallet and thus not possible to implement.
The reason that I put forward this question is not that I want to model exactly according to the real physical process at any price but that I want to use the built-in FlexSim logic as much as possible without too much adaptations for every small model change.

If you do not need to model the liquid iron being poured at a rate (which I can only imagine would be needed if you wanted the flow rate to be changing automatically based on the availability of either the upstream source or downstream destination of the liquid iron), then I suggest you don't worry about modeling the fluid nature of the liquid iron, and simply treat the entire pouring activity as a process time. At the end of the process time (OnProcessFinish trigger), you simply update a label on the ladle with it's new content.