Creating a circle in a square grid - matlab

Question

I try to solve the following 2D elliptic PDE electrostatic problem by fixing the Parallel plate Capacitors code. But I have problem to plot the circle region. How can I plot a circle region rather than the square?
% I use following two lines to label the 50V and 100V squares
% (but it should be two circles)
V(pp1-r_circle_small:pp1+r_circle_small,pp1-r_circle_small:pp1+r_circle_small) = 50;
V(pp2-r_circle_big:pp2+r_circle_big,pp2-r_circle_big:pp2+r_circle_big) = 100;
% Contour Display for electric potential
figure(1)
contour_range_V = -101:0.5:101;
contour(x,y,V,contour_range_V,'linewidth',0.5);
axis([min(x) max(x) min(y) max(y)]);
colorbar('location','eastoutside','fontsize',10);
xlabel('x-axis in meters','fontsize',10);
ylabel('y-axis in meters','fontsize',10);
title('Electric Potential distribution, V(x,y) in volts','fontsize',14);
h1=gca;
set(h1,'fontsize',10);
fh1 = figure(1);
set(fh1, 'color', 'white')
% Contour Display for electric field
figure(2)
contour_range_E = -20:0.05:20;
contour(x,y,E,contour_range_E,'linewidth',0.5);
axis([min(x) max(x) min(y) max(y)]);
colorbar('location','eastoutside','fontsize',10);
xlabel('x-axis in meters','fontsize',10);
ylabel('y-axis in meters','fontsize',10);
title('Electric field distribution, E (x,y) in V/m','fontsize',14);
h2=gca;
set(h2,'fontsize',10);
fh2 = figure(2);
set(fh2, 'color', 'white')

Answer 1

You're creating a square due to the way you're indexing (see this post on indexing). You've specified the rows to run from pp1-r_circle_small to pp1+r_circle_small and similar for the columns. Given that Swiss cheese is not an option, you're creating a complete square.
From geometry we know that all points within distance sqrt((X-X0)^2 - (Y-Y0)^2) < R from the centre of the circle at (X0,Y0) with radius R are within the circle, and the rest outside. This means that you can simply build a mask:
% Set up your grid
Xsize = 30; % Your case: 1
Ysize = 30; % Your case: 1
step = 1; % Amount of gridpoints; use 0.001 or something
% Build indexing grid for circle search, adapt as necessary
X = 0:step:Xsize;
Y = 0:step:Ysize;
[XX,YY] = meshgrid(X, Y);
V = zeros(numel(X), numel(Y));
% Repeat the below for both circles
R = 10; % Radius of your circle; your case 0.1 and 0.15
X0 = 11; % X coordinate of the circle's origin; your case 0.3 and 0.7
Y0 = 15; % Y coordinate of the circle's origin; your case 0.3 and 0.7
% Logical check to see whether a point is inside or outside
mask = sqrt( (XX - X0).^2 + (YY - Y0).^2) < R;
V(mask) = 50; % Give your circle the desired value
imagesc(V) % Just to show you the result
axis equal % Use equal axis to have no image distortion
mask is a logical matrix containing 1 where points are within your circle and 0 where points are outside. You can then use this mask to logically index your potential grid V to set it to the desired value.
Note: This will, obviously, not create a perfect circle, given you cannot plot a perfect circle on a square grid. The finer the grid, the more circle-like your "circle" will be. This shows the result with step = 0.01
Note 2: You'll need to tweek your definition of X, Y, X0, Y0 and R to match your values.